How Trump Is Making the Federal Judiciary Younger, Whiter, and More Republican

This article is part of the TPM Café, the TPM opinion and news analysis site. It was originally published on Balls and Strikes.

With the Senate adjourned until 2026, the book is closed on President Donald Trump’s first-year judicial nominations. How much damage did he do this time? In my opinion, a lot: The 26 people he appointed this year were younger, whiter and more openly partisan than those he appointed during his first term.

But if you’re looking for glimmers of hope, it probably could have been worse. In 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term, he appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and 12 judges to the appeals courts, including James Ho and future Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. This year, although Trump appointed more judges overall than in 2017, the vast majority were destined for district court seats — important judgeships, to be sure, but not as powerful as the appeals court seats Trump prioritized in 2017.

Currently, Trump has fewer than 50 vacancies to fill, and only one is an appeals court vacancy. Given how slowly new positions have emerged since his reelection, Trump may not get many more until the 2026 midterm elections, when control of the Senate — and the power to confirm judges — will be at stake.

Vacancies

In recent weeks, only three district court judges have announced their future retirement plans: Judge Douglas Harpool of the Western District of Missouri, Judge Susan Hickey of the Western District of Arkansas, and Judge Thomas Varlan of the Eastern District of Tennessee. Harpool and Hickey were both appointed by President Barack Obama, and Varlan was appointed by President George W. Bush. All sit in states with two Republican senators, which will make it easier to nominate their replacements.

In total, just 30 judges — three appeals court judges and 27 district court judges, 24 Republican appointees and six Democratic appointees — have created vacancies in the nearly 14 months since Trump’s re-election. That’s less than half of the roughly 70 judges who left office during the same period under the Biden administration. There are currently 22 Republican-appointed appeals court judges and 39 Republican-appointed district court judges who are currently eligible to retire, and most of them were already eligible to retire when Trump took office. So far, they have decided that allowing a doting, warmongering fraudster to appoint their replacement is not the legal legacy they wish to leave.

Right now, there are currently 40 vacancies, all for district court seats, and 28 of them in states with two Republican senators. There are nine future vacancies, only one of which is for a seat on the court of appeal.

Nominees and audiences

Despite all these vacancies in states with Republican senators, Trump announced only three new nominees last month: Brian Lea for the Western District of Tennessee, Justin Olson for the Southern District of Indiana and Megan Benton for the Western District of Missouri. All three appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on December 17.

If a Benton from Missouri looks familiar, that’s because last month we covered the retirement announcement of Eighth Circuit Judge Duane Benton, who also happens to be Megan Benton’s father. But putting aside any nepotism concerns, the younger Benton’s nomination is troubling in its own right, particularly given her many ties to Republican politics and the anti-abortion movement. Currently a state court judge, Benton was formerly chairman of the Platte County Republican Central Committee, which touts its support for the “right to life” on its website. In her last judicial election, Benton was supported by the Missouri Right to Life PAC. And at university she wrote a thesis called In God We Trust: Messages and Evangelical Political Behaviorwhich advocated the use of “moral messages” to increase Republican electoral success.

Lea, a former law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, spent most of his career at Jones Day in Atlanta, where he was an associate before leaving to join the Justice Department earlier this year. At Jones Day, Lea represented South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham when he was subpoenaed in a grand jury investigation into Trump’s attempts to interfere with Georgia’s vote counting in the 2020 presidential election. Lea also represented various religious employers in their challenges to the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage mandates.

Despite his ties to Georgia and the existence of a vacancy on the Atlanta district court, Trump nominated Lea to a seat on the district court in Tennessee, a state in which Lea has almost no ties: according to his responses to the Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire, he does not live there (Virginia), has never worked there (Atlanta and DC), has not attended law school there (Georgia), and has not worked for any judges there (Alabama and DC). He does not appear to have ever tried a case in Tennessee and was not admitted to practice in the state or Western District until earlier this year.

What gives, then? Well, Tennessee has something that Georgia doesn’t: two Republican senators. And since the home state senator’s approval was still required for district court nominees, Lea’s nomination would have been dead in the water in Georgia.

Despite the problems with Benton and Lea, no one fared worse at this week’s hearing than Justin Olson, an Indianapolis lawyer who specializes in litigation seeking to exclude transgender athletes from college sports. Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy questioned Olson about his time as an ordained elder in the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America, during which Olson gave sermons about how “transgenderism, homosexuality and fornication” are “sexual perversions” that stem from “inner shame,” and argued that God “called women to be submissive to their husbands.”

But Olson didn’t stop there. He also argued that marriage may not be for everyone, including “our disabled friends or our people with physical disabilities who might prevent the strong marriage to which we are called.” Anti-gay, anti-trans, and anti-woman beliefs are fairly common among Trump candidates, but opposing people with disabilities because they might not be able to have enough sex is new. Variety is the spice of life!

As is now customary, the candidates also refused to say that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election and avoided acknowledging that the Capitol was attacked on January 6. Apparently dissatisfied with the number of rakes he had already stepped on, Olson went further than the usual no-comment responses from his co-panelists and characterized the insurrection as “individuals are coming in.”[ing] the Capitol,” which is a bit like describing D-Day as “a fun day at the beach.”

Confirmation

Between the Thanksgiving holiday and meaningless health policy votes two weeks later, the Senate confirmed seven district court nominees: David Bragdon and Lindsey Freeman for the Middle District of North Carolina, Matthew Orso and Susan Rodriguez for the Western District of North Carolina, Robert Chamberlin and James Maxwell for the Northern District of Mississippi, and William Crain for the Eastern District of Louisiana.

What’s next

Nothing until 2026! By unanimous consent, Western Louisiana District nominee Alexander Van Hook’s nomination will remain in the Senate until lawmakers return in January, but all other nominees — Nicolas Ganjei, David Fowlkes, Aaron Peterson, John Guard, Lea, Benton and Olson — will, in general, be referred to Trump. Technically, these nominees must be reappointed, referred to the Judiciary Committee and rejected again. But this is very common, and you can expect all of these candidates to be back in the Senate by mid-January.

The big picture

It’s worth taking stock of these nominees collectively to see what they reveal about Trump’s new approach to nominating judges. In total, Trump announced 34 candidates this year. 30 (88%) of the candidates are white and 26 (77%) are men – both increases from Trump’s first term. Their average age is around 45 at the time of their appointment, three years younger than last time. More than half – 19 – represented a federal appeals court judge, and in all but one case that judge was appointed by a Republican president. Seven of them represented Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices, most often Clarence Thomas.

For Trump’s six nominees to the appeals court — judges who have precedent-setting power in their multistate jurisdictions — the average age was closer to 42, a decrease of nearly five years from Trump’s first term nominations. Some are young enough to reach state retirement age before the 2050s.

Overall, Trump’s record in 2025 reflects a movement still determined to reshape the courts in his embittered, grievance-fueled image — a movement limited (for now) only by a combination of a lack of urgent vacancies and the general incompetence of the executive branch. Although these judges are not as powerful, and although he cannot eclipse his first-term record, Trump’s second-term nominees are younger and more uniformly partisan than ever. And you can bet that wherever they sit, they’ll do their best to push the law to the right for decades to come.