The most hilarious paragraph you'll read in the New York Times today
Apparently Donald Trump is a narcissist. Who knew?
This is my shocked face.1
Why the face? Because Leonard Leo, the conservative Federalist Society maven who used Donald Trump’s presidency to remake the Supreme Court after a decades-long effort, was seemingly very, very surprised to learn that Trump did not share his ideological commitments and vision … but instead had his own selfish purposes in mind when remaking the judiciary.
We learn this in the most hilarious paragraph you’ll read in the New York Times today:
Mr. Trump was also infuriated that the justices he had put on the Supreme Court declined to repay his patronage by intervening in the 2020 election. As Mr. Trump criticized the court, Mr. Leo with the Federalist Society is said to have told associates he was disappointed that the former president’s rhetoric made his judicial appointment record look “transactional,” aimed at advancing Mr. Trump’s personal interests rather than a broader philosophical mission.
Oh my. Get me the smelling salts.
The revelation is (deservedly) buried deep in a very important story about the army of lawyers that Trump plans to bring with him to the White House if he wins another term.
This time, it won’t be ultra-conservative lawyers who, for professional reasons, feel an obligation to obey the law and stay within its boundaries.
Instead, Trump wants to fill the government with Roy Cohn — ultraconservative people who will tell him (wink!) that what he wants to do is legal, no matter what the law says.
To give you a sense of things: Trump is bypassing Leo’s Federalist Society — the folks who gave us Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett — because apparently those ideologues still have some limits.
He wants lawyers without limits.
Close allies of Donald J. Trump are preparing to populate a new administration with a more aggressive breed of right-wing lawyer, dispensing with traditional conservatives who they believe stymied his agenda in his first term.
The allies have been drawing up lists of lawyers they view as ideologically and temperamentally suited to serve in a second Trump administration. Their aim is to reduce the chances that politically appointed lawyers would frustrate a more radical White House agenda — as they sometimes did when Mr. Trump was in office, by raising objections to his desires for certain harsher immigration policies or for greater personal control over the Justice Department, among others.
But of course: The law is all about limits — the boundaries that we have to live and act within. And what Trump wants is to do away with limits to his own power, to do away with limits to his power to punish his enemies.
In his 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump has promised to “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after” President Biden and his family — shattering the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence. More than any legal policy statement on his campaign website, retribution may be the closest thing to a governing philosophy for Mr. Trump as he seeks a second term.
Let’s be plain about this: What Trump wants is a fleet of lawyers who will put the right window dressing on his authoritarianism. And if I have a problem with the NYT story, is that it doesn’t quite directly say so.
“Southpaw” makes this point at Bluesky, my preferred not-Twitter social media platform:
Semafor’s Dave Weigel disagrees, mentioning one of the story’s authors, Jonathan Swan:
I tend to agree with this analysis most of the time. I don’t think that the audience — and certainly not the NYT audience, which I presume to be mostly smart people — needs to be told that a bad thing is bad.
But they should be told what a bad thing means. I’m not sure this piece, despite its great merits, gets quite to that point.
And the point is this: If Federalist Society lawyers aren’t enough for Trump, then it’s clear the plan is for us to be governed by the cruelist right-wing dictator enablers possible. That won’t be a surprise to anybody who is paying attention.
It’s not actually my face, obviously. Stock photo.
Sarah Isgur and David French have come up with a useful way to look at the current SCOTUS lineup: Three left-of-center, three conservative institutionalists (Barrett, Kavanaugh, Roberts), and three conservative activists (my term). That’s why you get some strange alignments. In close calls, the institutionalists may side with precedents even if the result isn’t radical right (the redistricting cases, for instance). The activists are more interested in outcomes that follow their principles, consequences be damned. Gorsuch occasionally lines up with the progressives if the outcome follows his logic. (See: the Native American challenges, one of his specialties.) Isgur also recently noted that Barrett seems more likely than the older, male conservatives to include life experiences in her reasoning behind decisions. So there’s some unpredictability on the court, but -- interestingly! -- Thomas and Alito may be more likely to side with Trump than the justices he nominated. FYI the right-wingers, didn’t consider Dobbs a close call.