A vivid illustration of the way that President Trump has degraded the nation’s political discourse will be on view when the Senate Judiciary Committee holds its next hearing on Wednesday on his nominees to the federal courts. As has become his custom, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, will ask prospective judges virtually the same simple question and will, in all likelihood, receive virtually the same astonishing answer in return.
In one recent enactment of the ritual, Mr. Blumenthal asked Andrew Davis, a nominee to the Western District Court in Texas, the question, which concerned the presidential election of 2020: “Who won the popular vote in 2020?”
“Senator, in 2020, President Biden was certified and served four years as president,” Mr. Davis said.
The other witnesses on the panel, all nominees to federal judgeships, answered the same way. They said Mr. Biden was “certified” the winner in 2020, but none would acknowledge either that Mr. Biden actually won the election or that Mr. Trump lost it. Since Mr. Blumenthal and others began asking versions of the same question, 37 and counting of President Trump’s nominees to the federal bench have recited the “certified” catechism or merely stated that Mr. Biden “served” as president, thus refusing to state or by extension acknowledge the fact of Mr. Biden’s victory in 2020.
Ordinarily, Mr. Blumenthal is one of the more mild-mannered members of the Senate, but he has begun to respond to the stonewalling with contempt and ridicule. “Don’t you feel kind of like monkeys or puppets here?” he asked one panel. “You can choose not to answer the question,” he said another time, “but please don’t insult my intelligence by asking me to accept that answer.”
There’s no mystery about what’s going on. Nothing is closer to Mr. Trump’s heart than the malign fantasy that he won the 2020 election. As recently as March 15, he posted on Truth Social, “Our Country was unnecessarily RANSACKED by the United States Supreme Court, which has become little more than a weaponized and unjust Political Organization. … They wouldn’t even call out The Rigged Presidential Election of 2020 … and now, with time, it has been conclusively proven to be stolen.”
It’s unlikely that dozens of judicial nominees decided to use virtually the same formulations without a nudge from the top; the White House appears to be insisting that Mr. Trump’s judges stand by — or at least decline to contradict — his lies about 2020. Many of Mr. Trump’s nominees to administration jobs have given the same nonanswers. (Last week, Senator Markwayne Mullin, in his confirmation hearing to be the secretary of homeland security, refused to acknowledge Mr. Biden’s victory in 2020.) But there is a special peril when federal judges, who serve for life if confirmed, agree to demean themselves in this fashion.
“This is not a gotcha question,” Mr. Blumenthal told me. “It’s really a test of whether they are willing to stand up and be independent arbiters of fact, which they are required to be as district court judges, who often have to show some courage and backbone with cases with unpopular causes. The fact that they are so meek and easily cowed speaks volumes about their qualifications for the job.”
The incantations of “certified” also suggest a difference between Mr. Trump’s first-term nominees to the federal bench and those of his second. In his first term, Mr. Trump essentially outsourced the business of picking judges to the conservative Federalist Society, which delivered reliable soldiers for the president’s priorities. According to a study in The Times, Trump appointees to the federal appellate bench voted to allow his policies to go into effect in 92 percent of rulings, compared with 68 percent for the appointees of other Republican presidents and 27 percent for Democratic appointees.
Even with that impressive record, Mr. Trump appears to be shifting from ideology to loyalty as the primary qualification for judicial service. After Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, two of his three nominees to the Supreme Court, voted against him in the tariff case last month, Mr. Trump attacked them in the most intemperate terms, calling them “an embarrassment to their families.” It’s not enough, apparently, that Mr. Trump’s nominees take his side much of the time, as Justices Gorsuch and Barrett clearly do; he is instead looking for unwavering allegiance from all his judges on all issues.
This, in turn, raises the question of what kind of justice Mr. Trump might nominate if he has the opportunity to fill another vacancy on the Supreme Court. Several of his first-term appointees to the federal appellate bench, including, for example, Judges James C. Ho and Andrew S. Oldham, both of the Fifth Circuit, appear to be auditioning for the president with their outspokenly conservative opinions. (Mr. Trump appointed 234 judges in his first term and 34 so far in his second; Mr. Biden appointed 235 in his term.)
But if, as appears evident, Mr. Trump values service to himself above all, that might lead him more toward choosing Emil Bove, his former personal lawyer, who is now on the Third Circuit, or Aileen Cannon, the Florida district judge who dismissed the classified documents criminal case against Mr. Trump in 2024. Judge Bove and Judge Cannon appear ideologically similar to the other potential nominees, but they have also distinguished themselves with abject devotion to Mr. Trump himself.
In the meantime, the Senate, in Republican hands, will continue to process Mr. Trump’s nominees regardless of their nonanswers to the questions about 2020. Most of the prospective judges, in another attempt to avoid Mr. Trump’s ire, have evaded questions about the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
To date, the Senate has not rejected any of the president’s second-term judicial nominees; indeed, according to statistics compiled by Demand Justice, a left-leaning legal advocacy group, 19 Democratic senators have also voted to confirm at least one of Trump’s nominees who “gave dishonest or misleading information about Jan. 6 and the 2020 election.”
As Senator Blumenthal, a veteran of fifteen years on the Judiciary Committee, says, “I keep waiting for one or two of them to stand up and say, ‘I’m not going to say this nonsense. I’ve got plenty of other ways to make a living.’”
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