Trump Is Building a Federal Judiciary of Delusional, Cowardly Loyalists

On Wednesday, another batch of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees sat for their Senate confirmation hearings, which allowed them to join what has become an alarmingly crowded club over the past year: federal judicial nominees who refuse to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, or that (heaven help them) Trump lost it.

In previous hearings, when Democratic senators have asked about who “won” in 2020, Trump nominees have parroted the same carefully workshopped talking point, which is that Congress “certified” Biden as the winner, and that he served four years as president. You do not need to be a lawyer to understand how this sleight-of-hand works: Every nominee knows that publicly characterizing Biden as the “winner” would result in Trump hopping on Truth Social and pulling their nominations within minutes. By answering Democrats’ questions about 2020 in terms of what Congress did, nominees are saying something that is both technically correct, and also fully consistent with Trump’s beloved stolen-election conspiracy theories.

This time, though, Connecticut Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal phrased the question a little differently, asking the nominees on Wednesday’s panel about which 2020 candidate won the popular vote. His strategy, presumably, was to try to get around the standard “Congress certified” framing, because regardless of who you think the “rightful” winner of that election was, it is an objective, easily verifiable fact that when all the ballots were counted, Joe Biden had about 7 million more of them.

In news that I am sure will astonish you, no one was willing to answer this question any more honestly. “In 2020, President Biden was certified and served four years as president,” said Andrew Davis, a Texas district court nominee. “Joe Biden was certified the winner of the 2020 election and served four years,” said Anna St. John, a Louisiana district court nominee. “President Biden was certified the winner and served four years,” said John Shepherd, an Arkansas district court nominee. 

Texas district court nominee Christopher Wolfe, who had the misfortune of having to answer last, opted to power through this moment of temporary humiliation as quickly as possible. “Same answer, senator,” he said.

Blumenthal then tried asking nominees about which candidate won the Electoral College in 2020—the real-world event that prompted Congress, as the nominees all acknowledged, to “certify” Biden as the winner. This question also has an easy answer for anyone with Wikipedia access: Biden finished with 302 Electoral College votes, and Trump got 232 of them. Alas, this was also a bridge too far for the nominees, who offered the same “certified and served” response that they’d each given 30 seconds earlier. 

In both contexts, the answers are nonsensical: The fact that Congress certified Biden as the 2020 winner is not responsive to factual questions about which candidate got more of which type of vote. The entire exchange made it clearer than ever that all of Trump’s nominees have agreed, whether implicitly or explicitly, to the same cowardly little bargain: that federal judgeships are only available to those willing to pledge their loyalty to the man with the power to hand them out.

Blumenthal was floored. “I am insulted as a member of this body that you simply won’t tell us the truth,” he said to the nominees. “Don’t you feel kind of like monkeys or puppets here, having been given that answer by your minders, without standing up and speaking the truth?” (I am sorry to report that Blumenthal asked this question rhetorically, and the nominees did not answer it.)

The takeover of the federal judiciary by gutter bigots and January 6 sympathizers is, for many reasons, a moral and practical disaster with consequences that will reverberate for generations. The problem is especially acute at the district court level, because as Blumenthal pointed out, a very basic obligation of trial court judges is to decide cases—both those that are “political” and the many, many more that are not—according to objective facts. But for Trump judges, the only facts that matter are the ones that Trump authorizes them to believe.