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Donald Trump’s first term was filled with scandals, failures and tragedies, but the president managed to complete one of his most important goals: Working with a Republican-led Senate, he successfully stacked the federal courts with young, far-right ideologues. By the time Trump left office, he’d installed 234 federal judges — including a third of the U.S. Supreme Court — which created a dynamic Americans will be forced to live with for a generation.
Looking back, however, the president and his team aren’t altogether satisfied. The problem, evidently, is that some conservative, Trump-appointed jurists — many of them handpicked by the conservative Federalist Society — are not quite radical enough. Some have even had the audacity to issue rulings that Republicans didn’t like.
For Team Trump, this became a learning experience of sorts. Sure, his other successful judicial nominees were conservative, but not enough of them were knee-jerk conservatives who could be counted on to deliver for the right reflexively and without a lot of fuss or forethought. As NBC News reported last month, the president settled on “a new approach to selecting judges in his second term, departing from his first-term formula of younger up-and-comers, elite credentials and pedigrees in traditional conservative ideology and instead leaning toward unapologetically combative, MAGA-friendly nominees.”
It’s precisely why Team Trump decided that the Federalist Society simply wasn’t MAGA-aligned enough. In fact, a year before Election Day 2024, The New York Times reported that Team Trump had begun looking at Federalist Society members as “squishes.”
And this week, Senate Republicans, voting along party lines, confirmed Whitney Hermandorfer, who served as director of the strategic litigation unit in the Tennessee attorney general’s office, marking the first judicial confirmation of Trump’s second term. The Times reported:
She clerked for Justices Samuel A. Alito and Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court and for Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh when he sat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. At age 38, she is part of an effort by both parties to place younger judges on the bench, where they can serve for decades given their lifetime tenure, as opposed to the previous tradition of choosing lawyers with more extensive careers. Her legal background drew criticism from Democrats.
It did, indeed. Hermandorfer, who rose to public prominence defending a Republican abortion ban and challenging a Biden administration prohibition on discrimination against transgender students, only has six years of actual legal practice — and as my MSNBC colleague Lisa Rubin recently explained, that’s “roughly half of what the American Bar Association considers necessary to be qualified for a federal judgeship.”
During an exchange with Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware during her confirmation hearing, Hermandorfer conceded that she’d never served as sole or chief counsel in any case, tried to a jury verdict; never served as sole or chief counsel in any case tried to a final judgment; never personally engaged in direct examinations in federal court; never personally engaged in cross-examinations in federal court; never taken depositions; and never defended depositions.
Judge Jane Stranch, whom Hermandorfer was tapped to replace, had 31 years of legal experience before she was nominated for the appellate bench. Hermandorfer, in contrast, graduated from law school 10 years ago, has six years of legal experience, and no background doing the sorts of things one might expect a federal appellate court judge to have done.
That’s precisely why Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, described her lack of qualifications as “shocking.”
But in our post-qualifications era, Trump didn’t care, and Senate Republicans, including ostensible “moderates” such as Maine’s Susan Collins, played their role and rubber-stamped Hermandorfer’s nomination.
She is the first far-right judicial confirmation of the president’s second term, but she won’t be the last.