The highlights of the résumé of Josh Divine, President Donald Trump’s nominee to a federal district court vacancy in Missouri, are standard-issue conservative legal movement stuff: a clerkship with Justice Clarence Thomas; a stint in the office of Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley; continuous membership in the Federalist Society since 2013, when he started as a 1L at Yale Law School.
Today, Divine is Missouri’s solicitor general, a role that has allowed him to put the finishing touches on the exact sort of record that gets ambitious Republican lawyers noticed by the White House these days. Over the past several years, he has used the powers of his office to defend anti-trans legislation, fight President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, and support legal challenges to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, a common medication used in abortion. In 2024, Divine sought to file a lawsuit on behalf of the state of Missouri to thwart New York’s criminal prosecution of Trump, who has now returned the favor by tapping him for a life-tenured gig.
Considerably lower on Divine’s resume is the time he spent as a student journalist at the University of Northern Colorado, from which he graduated in 2012. But even before the Make America Great Again movement swallowed the Republican establishment whole, Divine was very much a proto-Make America Great Again guy: As an opinion writer for the Mirror, the university’s independent newspaper, and for another campus publication called UNC Connections, Divine never encountered a right-wing culture war he wouldn’t loudly, happily fight. His columns argued for a ban on abortion with no exceptions for rape; bemoaned the scourge of “bias and possible hatred against Christianity”; and explained moral opposition to homosexuality by grouping it with opposition to bestiality, polygamy, and “any form of sex that goes against the biological design of procreation and the nurturing of a family.”
In a 2012 column about the prosecution of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager in Florida, Divine criticized “the media” for identifying Zimmerman as “white Hispanic,” which he described as “a ploy toward branding the situation as racist profiling.” Divine was also perplexed by the term “white Hispanic” itself: “What does that even mean?” he asked. “Is President Obama a white black man? What about a Halfrican-American?”
Most of Divine’s writing is the sort of dreck you might expect from a 19-year-old white guy going through a profoundly misguided long hair phase. But in previous Republican administrations, this paper trail of right-wing activism would be, at the very least, a yellow flag in the nominations process—a reason to pick someone else, perhaps with a record that would prompt fewer uncomfortable questions during a Senate confirmation hearing. During the second Trump presidency, however, Divine’s public fidelity to the conservative policy agenda is a point in his favor, because it assures the powers that be that if he is indeed confirmed as a judge, they can count on him for a lifetime of loyalty and obedience.
Divine’s columns routinely promoted anti-choice politics, often using movement language that many mainstream Republican politicians at the time avoided using in public. “I am a zealot,” Divine wrote in October 2010, arguing that “pre-born humans have had their inalienable right to life stripped from them” by “abortion mills” running a “lucrative business.” In September 2011, he argued that the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate “forces insurers to essentially provide the equivalent of abortions,” since birth control can prevent implantation of a “genetically unique human zygote, which may be between five and seven days old when birth control ensures its death.” A month later, he compared the Supreme Court’s opinion in Roe v. Wade to its infamous decisions in Dred Scott v. Sandford and Plessy v. Ferguson—a frequent talking point among conservative activists prior to the Court’s decision to overturn Roe in 2022.
Divine reserved some of his harshest criticism for Planned Parenthood, which he said “has been shown to aid sex traffickers” and “disproportionately targets minorities for abortions.” In April 2011, he voiced his frustration that Planned Parenthood hadn’t been hit with criminal charges for “false advertising” or “intentionally misleading the public”—a failure he attributed to the fact that “much of the judicial system is agenda-based.” In the same column, Divine expressed optimism that the Republican-controlled House would defund the organization during the annual budget process. As Missouri’s solicitor general, Divine has had the privilege of defending the state legislature’s attempts to block Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid reimbursements—the same policy for which he stumped as a junior in college 15 years earlier.
Clip via YouTube
Divine’s columns on race and democracy, too, contained the sort of conspiratorial musings that would not have sounded out of place in your average O’Reilly Factor monologue. He advocated for voter ID laws by citing examples of “Democrat voter fraud,” and defended Arizona SB 1070, the controversial “show me your papers” law that the U.S. Supreme Court largely struck down in 2012, by arguing that because the bill prohibited racial profiling, law enforcement officials would not engage in it. In October 2010, Divine called for the reinstitution of state-administered literacy tests as a condition for voting; although he acknowledged that during Jim Crow, such tests “were used as a form of discrimination” against Black people, he asserted that literacy tests were, by themselves, “not a bad thing.” (Jen Bendery first reported on Divine’s pro-literacy tests advocacy at HuffPo.)
In January 2011, Divine defended the free speech rights of a local DJ who decided to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day by reading a white supremacist essay critical of the late civil rights leader; in his column, Divine mourned the “political-correctness dogma that has permeated society,” and argued that the DJ’s citation to a white supremacist source “does not discredit the information” contained therein. Although he described birther conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama’s citizenship as “far-fetched,” Divine nevertheless criticized Obama for being insufficiently transparent as a candidate, especially about his academic record: Given the “rumor” of his middling grades as an undergrad at Columbia, Divine argued, “one must wonder” how Obama got into Harvard Law School in the first place.
“I don’t know how he got into Harvard, and I don’t know why he’s hiding his record,” Divine wrote. “That’s the problem.”
Divine was especially concerned about protecting the legal and social privileges enjoyed by conservative Christians. In April 2010, he explained that it would be “impossible” for Christians to “just leave their religion at home,” since Christians “in particular” are “obliged ethically to impose their beliefs on others.” In March 2011, he said that a university that had denied funding to a religious student organization had “actually treated religious groups worse than other groups”—an early version of the modern Supreme Court’s conviction that upholding the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment means ignoring the Establishment Clause altogether.
Later that year, as Tebowmania swept through Colorado, Divine characterized criticism of the then-Denver Broncos quarterback as the product of “bias and possible hatred against Christianity.” Christians, he continued, are “the largest group in America that’s willing to face public ridicule for standing true to their beliefs.”
Finally, like many of today’s Republican politicians, Divine repeatedly rejected the notion that bigotry might animate any of his beliefs. In the story about the radio DJ, for example, Divine argued that the word “hate” had become “nothing more than an ad homonym [sic]”; when discussing abortion, he described the anti-choice movement as motivated not by “hatred,” but by “science and compassion.” In a column justifying opposition to same-sex marriage, he argued that “hate” and “ignorance” are “rarely ever used as legitimate complaints,” and “exhibit the emotional immaturity of those who use them.” Most opponents of same-sex marriage are not homophobes, he added, but are merely “opposed to a group receiving extra benefits.”
Divine expanded on this line of thinking in August 2011, explaining that the fight over same-sex marriage “is not, and has never been, about equal rights,” because the “vast majority” of opponents simply believe it “has a negative effect on both society and the constituents of gay relationships.”
“That’s not hate; that’s concern,” Divine wrote.
During his career as a columnist, Divine checked every box on the conservative legal movement’s wish list: an anti-abortion crusader, a democracy skeptic, a bigotry apologist, and a proud religious supremacist. At the time, he probably did not imagine that cranking out a weekly column for the undergrad student newspaper might one day help him land a coveted seat on the federal bench. But it did, because this is what Trump expects of his judicial nominees: true believers who will implement their shared policy agenda long after he leaves office. When you make it this easy to see what you will do with power, he will be glad to give it to you.
