Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to her position by President Donald Trump near the end of his first term in 2020, ostensibly cementing a 6-3 conservative-leaning majority for the high court, though in actuality, she has sided with her liberal colleagues on several major cases.

In the view of many of Trump's supporters, Barrett has largely been a disappointment, but the president just defended the justice from the criticism she's received and insisted that she's a "very good woman" and deserving of respect, The Hill reported.

Trump's defense of Barrett was surprising to some, given that she has already ruled against his administration on a handful of occasions so far this year.

Trump defends Barrett

On Sunday, while speaking with reporters on board Air Force One, President Trump was asked about the fierce criticism Justice Barrett has received from some of his supporters following a recent decision she joined that disfavored the administration.

"She’s a very good woman," Trump said of Barrett, per The Hill. "She’s very smart, and I don’t know about people attacking her, I really don’t know."

The president reiterated, "I think she’s a very good woman. She’s very smart."

Barrett has ruled against Trump this term

It was less than a couple of weeks ago, according to Newsweek, that Justice Barrett, along with Chief Justice John Roberts, had joined with their three liberal colleagues on the Supreme Court to rule 5-4 to uphold a district court's order for the Trump administration to unfreeze upwards of $2 billion in frozen foreign aid payments.

Just one day prior to that, Barrett had again sided with the three liberals to partially dissent against the court majority's ruling that overturned an appellate panel's decision that favored the Environmental Protection Agency.

President Trump's continued support for Barrett was perhaps most surprising in light of how she ruled in January, little more than a week before he took office, to oppose his request for a stay against the scheduled sentencing for his criminal conviction in New York last year.

Barrett is not the hard-core conservative some claimed her to be

Newsweek attempted to downplay the significance of Justice Barrett's rulings against President Trump and his administration by pointing out how she has, more often than not, sided with the conservative-leaning majority's decisions so far in the Supreme Court's current session.

The current term's results thus far don't tell the entire story of Barrett's years on the bench, though, unlike a CNN report last November that highlighted her apparent independence from the conservative-leaning majority and her newfound role as the "last best hope" for liberals at the Supreme Court.

That "independence" for Barrett has not only been marked by her voting alongside her three liberal colleagues in the minority -- though sometimes joined with those three plus Chief Justice Roberts in a bipartisan majority -- but also by her occasional butting of heads in written concurrences or dissents with two of her staunchly conservative colleagues, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

Her overall voting record on the court, while unquestionably more conservative-leaning than liberal, has nonetheless disproven the allegations hurled against her by Senate Democrats during Barrett's confirmation hearings that she would be a locked-in vote for Trump and Republicans at all times, no matter the specifics of any given case before the high court.

That has simply not been the case at all, and a USA Today op-ed in January boldly suggested that Barrett was owed an apology by the Democrats and liberals who smeared her with false accusations of partisanship and political motivations.