Special master ruling shows Trump’s takeover of courts has started to sting

In the first televised presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in 2020, the sitting president was asked why voters should re-elect him to the White House. He gave a relatively obscure answer – it was all about the judges, he said.

By the end of his first term in office, Trump bragged, he would have smashed all records for the number of his appointments to the federal bench. “I’ll have approximately 300 federal judges.”

Characteristically, Trump was lying. He ended his single tenure having placed 231 men and women on the federal bench, including three on the US supreme court, 54 on appeals circuits and 174 on district courts.