President Donald Trump is being warned that he "chose the wrong targets" when he went after the powerful Federalist Society and its co-founder as part of his war on judges who refuse to bend to his will, according to a political science professor writing for MSNBC.
The Federalist Society and co-founder Leonard Leo helped Trump choose Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett during his first term.
But on Truth Social last week, Trump called Leo a “sleazebag” and “a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America," while he blamed the Federalist Society for “the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations.”
Austin Sarat with Amherst College wrote, "The impetus for the post was a ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade holding that he did not have legal authority for his most sweeping tariffs."
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And, although Trump is known to go after political allies and enemies alike, Sarat wrote that "in the Federalist Society and Leo, Trump may have chosen the wrong targets," adding, "It is self-destructive to throw them under the bus when they have deep and continuing ties to members of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, and when their political operation was crucial to Trump’s judicial nominations in his first term."
Trump is also apparently still sore over the court's failure to back his 2020 election denialism. Sarat wrote, "For Trump, for whom every action is transactional, the conservatives’ failure to help him stay in the White House would be seen as a betrayal — not just by the justices but by their patron."
Trump's frustration with the judiciary shows no signs of abating according to Sarat, who noted that "Republican-appointed judges are ruling against Trump’s second administration nearly as often as Democratic-appointed judges."
He added that lashing out at Leo -- described as a "den mother" to conservative judges — "is hardly the way to curry favor with those who are the beneficiaries of their care."