Trump Lashes Out At Federalist Society
Will no one rid me of these meddlesome judges?
POLITICO (“Trump goes after Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society in fury over court ruling“):
President Donald Trump leveled unusually pointed criticism of a prominent conservative legal activist and organization Thursday as he railed against a ruling that struck down his sweeping tariffs.
The president, in a post on his social media platform, slammed Leonard Leo, the former chair of the Federalist Society, calling him a “sleazebag” who “probably hates America.”
It was a striking characterization of Leo, who played a key role in working with Trump to shape the conservative Supreme Court.
“He openly brags how he controls Judges, and even Justices of the United States Supreme Court — I hope that is not so, and don’t believe it is!,” Trump wrote.
Trump’s attack came after the U.S. Court of International Trade on Wednesday struck down his tariffs, a massive blow to the primary pillar of the administration’s economic agenda. The ruling was temporarily stayed by an appellate court on Thursday. One of the judges on the three-person panel that blocked the tariffs is Timothy Reif, who was appointed by Trump in his first term.
The blame, Trump said, lay with the Federalist Society.
“I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations,” he wrote. “This is something that cannot be forgotten!”
[…]
Trump’s relationship with the activist is known to have grown strained over Trump’s disappointment that the three conservative justices he appointed to the court on Leo’s advice did not intervene to keep Trump in office after he lost the 2020 presidential election.
The Federalist Society worked with the Trump administration to develop a shortlist of candidates for the Supreme Court during his 2016 presidential campaign. Leo was a pivotal figure in the conservative legal group for more than two decades, and took leaves of absence to manage the selection and confirmation process for Trump’s Supreme Court picks. Many people viewed the judicial selection process as essentially outsourced to the Federalist Society.
Despite the falling out between Trump and Leo, many legal conservatives said in recent months that they expected him to remain influential in the choices Trump makes for judicial nominations in his second term.
But the full-on rupture evident in Trump’s social media post Thursday signals that Trump may now view nominees’ Federalist Society ties as toxic and any sign of a link to Leo could doom a potential nominee. That could lead to more extreme or inexperienced nominees for the federal bench, although all still require Senate confirmation.
Contrary to popular opinion, the overwhelming number of Federalist Society judges are conservative ideologues, not Republican stooges. They have very strong opinions of the Constitution and the legal system that often result in rulings that frustrate Democrats. But their belief in limited government with constrained powers will also hamstring Republicans hoping to upend the system.
More than any President in memory—and I’m not a young man—Trump simply doesn’t care about rules, norms, and process. He simply wants the results that he wants and sees anything that gets in the way of that as nefarious and disloyal.
When Trump wields power (or simply runs his mouth), he does so in a way that causes enemies to spring up out of the ground (h/t Mario Puzo).
Confused windbag skeezebag sleazebag calls another power-mad treasonous fellow traveler by his own slur. Misanthrope on misanthrope violence. Perfect.
Trump is a vile and despicable man, but nothing he says is more offensive than the proclamation that anyone who disagrees with him hates America. Clearly he thinks that he owns the justices he nominated just as Musk owns him.
I’m amused when TACO’s followers complain about “these unelected judges” are reminded that the members is SCOTUS are also unelected.
This is a vanishingly small distinction. Most of them are conservative ideologues AND Republican stooges. I think the fact that some of them have idiosyncratic beliefs and conservative fantasies doesn’t change the fact that they are both. The simple fact is that they wouldn’t get enough Republican votes, at this point*, if they weren’t stooges.
*I’ll grant you that there might have been a point in time where being a “conservative” as opposed to a “stooge” got you on the bench, but we’re past that point. Even now, the ones that are on the bench that have any aspirations of a promotion understand that the stooges get better jobs.
@Charley in Cleveland:
Every accusation is a confession
“Trump Lashes Out At Federalist Society”
Can I root for injuries?
@Beth: To be clear, I am not a fan of the Federalist Society nor of their ideological views.
But James is making a worthwhile distinction. What Trump wants is a bunch of Aileen Cannons who will just do whatever is in Trump’s interest. That’s a true stooge because it has little or nothing to do with ideology.
That doesn’t mean Federalist Society types won’t often rule in ways that Trump likes, but what it means for Trump is that it is a happy coincidence of ideology with stoogery.
Trump is mad at the Federal Society because he didn’t just appoint a bunch of cronies.
The scarey thing to me is that he might, in fact, start doing exactly that.
@Charley in Cleveland:
Amen to that.
This latest rant just drips of L’État, c’est moi. There is not a word in there about interpretation of the law. If the ruling goes against TACO’s wishes, it’s political. “What other reason could it be?”
Who’d have thought that electing a convicted felon would have led to such disregard for the law. Thanks, Roberts Court!
Good article.
Lest anyone think the president’s anti-Leo critiques were leveled coherently, this is Trump’s actual diseased mind Truth Social screed, in full:
If a Democratic president posted this on social, we’d already have 25th Amendment think pieces published at WaPo, the WSJ, and the NYT.
In other news, ratings for Jake Tapper’s CNN show apparently hit a ten-year low this month.
@Rob1: Indeed! And I hope Mr. Leo has learned a valuable lesson from this: if one is setting up a fascist autarky that one hopes to control from the shadows, one must control the despot as well as the minions. While having the intellect for it, Trump is ill-suited for the role of figurehead face of a shadow government.
I think it’s a classic Machiavellian problem of failing to remember that mercenaries seldom stay bought. Especially when they see themselves as the principal rather than the subordinate.
@Moosebreath:
“Let them fight”
@Steven L. Taylor:
So does Leo, at least in my take. So far, this new conservative approach to political machine is showing as a mixed bag. Leo would have been better served hitching his wagon to someone more of a toad than a potential agent of chaos. He should have tried to pave the way for Mitch to lead the charge against Trump at impeachment #2 to get a more conventional politician as the face of the machine.
Not taking Trump out may have been a fatal mistake. At 60, Leo may not have enough time to reconfigure the machine into a lasting entity, though the Republicans do have a deeper bench so he may be able to benefit from another reset by a Democratic “caretaker/placeholder” government.
@just nutha: Leo helped get good judges appointed, who are the best protection for the country. If he was aiming for fascism he wouldn’t have promoted adherence to the founding documents.
@Fortune:
No, they are not “good judges.” They are ideological extremists acting on behalf of the quasi-liberarian billionaires who have been engineering a reactionary movement against the working class voters empowered by a once expanding liberal democracy. The sheer numbers were terrifying them.
Adherence? Come on! They twist themselves into a disingenuous
“pretzel” projecting their self-serving ideological ambitions onto those documents as if a blank slate. I call b.s.
Torturing pets is a precursor to serial murder. Is torturing pets as bad as serial murders? Absolutely not. But they are the same pathology.
MAGA is upon us not because of liberal overreach (though I have my issues with that) but because of the intellectual collapse of conservatism. Conservatism failed. Conservative laissez-faire economics failed, killed by reality. Conservative religious morality failed, killed off by science and philosophy. And conservative legal theories failed because time goes forward not backward, and no, a room full of guys in Philadelphia two centuries ago did not create the perfect political system, any more than wandering Hebrews in the Judean desert created a perfect moral system.
Conservatism has always been a project devoted to maintaining the power of an elite, and suppressing racial, sexual or class out-groups. It’s always been about stasis in a world that needed evolution. It’s never been anything but the pseudo-intellectual self-justification for the dominance of the rich and powerful. Conservatism reassured the powerful that they could exploit and steal and kill and still pretend to be good, decent Christians, or occasionally, Jews.
It’s never been anything but a bullshit rationalization. An excuse for indifference to anyone not inside the magic circle, and contempt for anyone who cried out from the pain they inflicted with their bullshit self-satisfied theories. Theories which were never anything more than,’I got mine, fuck you.’
The collapse of the conservative con job meant to enshrine the status quo, led directly to the birth of MAGA which intends to destroy the status quo and create an overt autocracy minus the politesse. Reagan created MAGA as much as Trump did.
Is anyone surprised that the newest iteration of conservatism is now set on destroying the shattered remnants of the old?
@Michael Reynolds: I don’t think Conservatism, in all the permutations you suggest, has failed as much as some of us have finally realized what a crock it was to begin with. As for the causes of the failure, I’ll riff of the meme about Trump: Everything Humanity Touches Dies.
(Have I mentioned my Calvinist upbringing in the past? 😉 )
I’m still trying to come to terms with the fact that we have a president who uses locutions such as “sleazebag” and “ass-kissing” in public discourse.
@DK: Sounds like Trump is having one of his more lucid days. I could follow that.
If it weren’t for the random ALL CAPS and Capitalization*, I would think it was spoken and transcribed by his phone. It has a very informal, spoken tone that I think a lot of writers fail to capture in their dialog.
It wasn’t good, and it was repetitive and grievance filled whining, but it was mostly clear. Conveys a lot of character too. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
*: I actually like random Capitalization for emphasis. It was common in 18th century English, and it’s a shame that it fell out of favor. There’s a fundamental difference between an avocado and an Avocado. The latter is clearly more important, and although it may be the object of the sentence it is clearly the subject of the thought.
One of my favorite novels was translated from faux-formal Polish into faux-18th-century English, and uses this technique a lot. There’s a newer translation by someone who thought translating into faux-18th-century English was an incredibly stupid idea, who translated it into faux-19th-century English, and it’s not nearly as good, in part because it lacks that marking of the subject of the thought in writing that dances around the subject.
I’d like to expound on my comment above (TL;DR: Every accusation is a confession).
I maintain that the MAGAts along with their Taco in Chief hate America. However, if fascism was a counterrevolution to a revolution that didn’t take place, the object of their hatred is a country that never existed.
What they hate is a country that embraces inclusion and diversity, and values equity. A country that cares about the poor and minorities, that accepts immigrants as equals, that shows compassion and care for those who are vulnerable (namely transgender youth). A country that values freedom of speech, of thought, of belief, of action, with limits on the infringement of other people’s rights. A country that cares about global security and stability. A country that aims to level the playing field for all.
America is not that country and has never been.
It has approached these ideals now and then, and withdrawn from them as well. But it always pretends to be such a country.
This is what they hate and what they want to tear down.
@Michael Reynolds:
I’m excerpting the above because your excoriation of the conservative movement is simply delicious and bears repeating.
That said, any description of conservatism ought to include some explanation for how conservatives have managed to sell their brand to those without riches or power. There’s something about the conservative’s “magic circle” that can defy the laws of physics, sociology, anthropology, and economics such that citizens can believe themselves as part of the in-groups when they sure as hell are not.
The elites have the riches, but they (by design) don’t have the numbers. The secret to conservativism’s persistence lies in the movement’s artful hiding of the fact it is (and has always been) a crock (per @just nutha).
@Steven L. Taylor:
I dunno. I think Cannon is an obvious one, but with a quieter one, I don’t think the distinction matters much. It’s real, it’s there, but not very potent and not all the time.
Maybe we’re also kinda off on our terms. Because I think the whole point of the Federalist society is to ensure that they are both conservative ideologues AND Republican stooges. If I’m remembering correctly, one of the things Leo and the rest of them were looking to do was ensure that no more David Souters got anywhere near the Supreme Court.
Maybe the actual distinction is this, the Federalist Society wants conservative ideologues that are also REPUBLICAN stooges while Trump doesn’t care what their ideology is as long as they are TRUMP stooges.
I agree with you that it’s mostly an (un)happy accident that these judges tend to be stoogy for both Republicans and Trump. But yeah, that’s not the same thing even if it looks like it most of the time.
@Rob1: You denounced judges whose decisions you don’t like on this thread, and called a president you don’t like a “fake” on the daily thread. Those are both Trump moves. The law and election results are supposed to keep politics grounded.
@Fortune:
Fake news, dork.
Yesterday I cracked that a tariff case isn’t over til the fat Justice dissents. Someone pointed out, correctly, that Thomas might not dissent. He’s not Trump’s creature, he’s a creature of rich people who are being hurt by this tariff nonsense. Trump called them “my judges”, but they’re Leo and Koch’s judges. They may not be “stooges”, but they were selected for their ideological leanings and those leanings have been carefully nurtured and rewarded.
An aspiring autocrat needs to take control of the courts. Trump 2.0 arrived with the Kochtopus having already taken control of at least the Supreme Court. Trump partly seized power, but he was partly installed by the conservative establishment. Watching the dynamic between Trump and the establishment, who partly support, partly oppose him, is entertaining. It’d be more entertaining if it were in some third world place I don’t live in.
There is the possibility the conservative establishment will constrain Trump. But Hindenburg installed Hitler at the behest of establishment conservatives. That didn’t work out well.
@Beth: I’m not going to argue with someone who’s dealing with near-suicidal depression.
@Fortune:
You and yours wrote the script, brother. Now you’re calling for decorum and propriety, having adulterated the system and trampled on trust. You can go take a long walk off a short pier.
@Fortune:
That comment in itself exposes what a thoroughly disingenuous, underhanded person you are. Your demeanor here, modulated victimhood, is fake.
@DK:
I wonder why Trump felt a need not to directly attack the justices he appointed. For some reason he felt that inappropriate and issued a screed on the guy who recommended them to him….as if he could say that without also offending those justices?
(insert Spock “Fascinating” meme here)
@Rob1: You and yours have been denying elections and denouncing judges every time they go against you, all my life. I have no problem arguing with you except for controlling my urge to vomit.
@Fortune:
And yet there was no election denying terror attack on Congress, or reports of the federal judiciary mulling creation of a nationwide private security force, till you and yours came along.
Reckon there’s important differences between regular free speech complaints and critiques vs the irregular, vomit-inducing fascist bile inspired by the Epstein-bestie rapist president JD Vance once described as “America’s Hitler.” Notwithstanding the intellectually-lazy bothsidesism peddled by bitter, immature rightwing phonies.
@Fortune: Probably a good idea. She has no fucks left to give, including your snowflake feelings or straw man “arguments” where you’re all wishy washy and shit.
@Fortune:
Really? Do you wear a Melania jacket with “I really don’t care … about you” emblazoned on the back?