Whitney Hermandorfer is the first far-right judicial nominee to be confirmed during the president’s second term, and she won’t be the last.
Trump set out to put “unapologetically combative, MAGA-friendly†conservatives on the federal bench.
Senate Republicans are already playing their role, rubberstamping the first of many unqualified nominees. www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...
— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2025-07-15T13:06:14.845Z
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-judges-whitney-hermandorfer-rcna218823
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.”....
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.
trump is picking judges are too extreme for the Federalist Society. Six years out of law school is too soon to be a judge
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