Late summer 2024 has found Trump almost comically torn between two competing political demands. On one side, you have a conservative movement that has increasingly remade itself in his image, grafting radical, revanchist ideas for a new American “regime” onto Trump’s unique, very personal politics. This movement is given form by Project 2025, an initiative that is housed in the Heritage Foundation but which pulls in policy proposals and authors from across the ecosystem of right-wing think tanks. The Christian nationalists who hope for a national abortion ban and, in some cases, legislation that would put an end to many fertility treatments, also go in this bucket. JD Vance is a kind of spokesperson for this crowd.
Then, on the other side, you’ve got Trump’s efforts to appear normal: a common-sense candidate, a candidate who can resist claims that he is a threat to democracy or, simply, in league with people who are “weird.” His recent outreach to “barstool conservatives” and alienated young men through a bunch of interviews with Joe Rogan-adjacent streamers more or less fits here.
And so you get the bizarre result: Trump’s Jekyll and Hyde act, as he switches back and forth, alternately embodying a burn-it-all-down would-be authoritarian revolutionary and a kind-of-eccentric-but-hopefully-not-too-scary guy from TV. He knows nothing, he maintains, about the radical proposals of Project 2025, though 140 members of his administration worked on it. He will not sign an abortion ban, he insists, and he will not sign legislation that endangers IVF; he is in fact a great champion of women’s rights, though he will not articulate a clear platform on abortion policy.
Another chapter in this saga is beginning to emerge, with Trump promising to, at some point soon, release a list of people he would appoint to the Supreme Court. Yet he keeps kicking the can on when exactly that list is coming. Jay Willis outlines the story so far for the legal news outlet Balls and Strikes:
Although he’s been the presumptive GOP nominee since the moment he begrudgingly left the Oval Office, Trump has yet to say whom he might nominate to the Court if he wins this time around. In March, he told a conservative media outlet that he would be releasing a new list of “about 20” names, in part because he is uniquely aware of the potential payoff. “I think it’s important to reveal who your Supreme Court justices will be,” Trump said. “There are people who say the list helped me win the election last time.” In June, citing “sources close to the presumptive GOP nominee,” Fox News reported that Trump still planned to share his list “in [the] coming weeks or months.”
The latest progress report is, if anything, even more vague. In an interview with CBS News on Monday, Trump said his list would at last be ready “over the next three or four weeks”—or, at another point in the interview, “over the next, probably, month or so.” When asked if he’d at least tease any of the names under consideration, Trump’s slackjawed “uhhhh” response was indistinguishable from that of a seventh-grader asked to stand before the class and deliver a book report he didn’t prepare on a book he didn’t read.
Like the disavowal of Project 2025 and Trump’s tortured attempt at triangulating on abortion, the phantom shortlist phenomenon reflects his worries that the policies embraced by his most diehard supporters and the institutions of the conservative movement are not going to play well with the voters Trump needs, the voters for whom he hopes to be the champion of “common-sense” policies. His 2025 shortlist might just be too “weird.”
Trump did put out a shortlist in 2016, a gift to the Federalist Society that paved the way for the current, deeply unpopular Supreme Court majority — the majority behind such bangers as Dobbs, which scrapped Roe v. Wade, Loper Bright, which undermines federal regulatory agencies by scrapping the concept of Chevron deference, and the last-day-of-term bombshell decision on presidential immunity.
But this year’s Schrödinger’s shortlist may in fact be even more of a problem than that 2016 effort. Trump is reportedly annoyed with the Federalist Society — not for its politics, or not exactly. Rather, as Willis of Balls and Strikes points out, it’s for a more predictable reason: Trump is annoyed because Federalist Society lawyers and judges did not do more for Donald Trump. The New York Times reported in November 2023 that Trump reserves his “deepest rage” for the Federalist Society-approved officials in his own administration, “who largely rejected his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.” From that Times report:
At the start of Mr. Trump’s term, his administration relied on the influential Federalist Society, the conservative legal network whose members filled key executive branch legal roles and whose leader helped select his judicial nominations. But in a striking shift, Trump allies are building new recruiting pipelines separate from the Federalist Society.
[…]
“The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” said Russell T. Vought, a former senior Trump administration official who runs a think tank with close ties to the former president. He argued that many elite conservative lawyers had proved to be too timid when, in his view, the survival of the nation is at stake.
In other words, Trump’s 2025 shortlist is likely to be far more extreme than the one put out by the 2016 campaign to please business-minded Republicans. It is likely to be far more extreme than the first Trump term. It is likely to have quite a bit in common with those Heritage Foundation- and Russ Vought-backed policy projects that Trump has, in recent months, scrambled to disavow.
It makes sense that Trump does not want it out before the election.
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Zuckerberg’s Spineless Surrender: Rehashing Old News To Enable False GOP Narratives — Mike Masnick, TechDirt
Frist!
Cat.
Trump teasing his 2025 SCOTUS shortlist is just a more-desperate attempt to steal back the news cycle.
Sad and weak. He can go directly to jail, without passing Go and collecting $200.
Trump has always pulled this stuff, making his policies appear more centrist and teasing a realize of information of some kind. The press has been his lackeys in this, lapping up every bit of the show and giving him more credit than he deserves on “centrist” policies. We know now how that will turn out, because he’s already had one administration where bad policies ruled, and the centrism was pushed by people who won’t be welcome in his new administration. Instead, they will be replaced by extremists who intend to push a Christian theocracy onto us, regardless of our religious beliefs or if we want such a thing.
The press really needs to do a better job exposing how Trump actually intends to rule instead of focusing on the usual horserace reporting that normalizes even the worst of Trump’s behavior. I have a feeling that’s not going to happen, so it’s up to the Harris campaign and us to make sure people understand exactly how awful Trump 2: Electric Boogaloo will actually be.
I am so sick of his bullshit and sicker yet that the press treats it as if it is NOT TOTAL BULLSHIT.
Good lord I am sick of it.
Will we ever be rid of him?
Poor, poor, Donnie. His shtick is old and tired and spent and desperate and offensive and much like a past his prime comedian, pathetic.