Donald Trump offered traditional conservative voters two big things in 2016: Mike Pence as vice president, and a judges list of jurists, academics, and politicians he’d consider appointing to the Supreme Court.
This time around, he’s acted as if he’s got those voters locked up — and doesn’t need those who aren’t. He went the whole primary season without reviving a judges list, and for his running mate, he picked J. D. Vance, a very un-Pence-like factional MAGA choice rather than a coalition-builder.
Trump has been sagging in the polls and starved for a good news cycle ever since Joe Biden dropped out. With the authoritarian progressive Kamala Harris in the race, endorsing Biden’s Supreme Court–packing term-limits plan and proposing a leftist push on economics, conservatives who mistrust or despise Trump have newly urgent motivations to give him another look. But it would help for Trump to offer some positive reason to vote for him and blunt the Democrats’ entirely hypocritical effort to wrap themselves in the mantle of the rule of law.
The obvious move is to release a judges list — a good one. Trump promised one back in March and has yet to deliver. His judicial selections were the highlight of his presidency, but the people involved in those selections now appear to be out of favor with Trump, and there are lingering concerns about how his choices this time around could be swayed for the worse by Trump’s frustration with how constitutionalist judges handled his 2020 election challenges. A good list could relieve some of those concerns.
On Monday, Trump told Caitlin Huey-Burns of CBS News that “I’ll be releasing it I’d say over the next three or four weeks.” It can’t come soon enough for Republicans.