Trump’s presidency rises or falls based on the work of others.
Trump’s presidency rises or falls based on the work of others.
P resuming that Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed to the Supreme Court, Donald Trump will very likely head into reelection having nominated and seated three justices to the Supreme Court. He will have transformed the federal judiciary on all levels for a generation. The inexplicable Bostock decision of Justice Neil Gorsuch notwithstanding, Trump will have fulfilled his 2016 campaign promise to appoint originalist justices.
Also by the end of his first term, Donald Trump will have completely withdrawn U.S. troops from zero of the countries to which the Obama administration had deployed them. He will have failed even to pull them out of Syria, though he has repeatedly promised an end to America’s role in a confusing civil war there. His promise to end endless wars is put off.
The lesson to draw from these is not so much about Trump. It wasn’t all up to him. What mattered were the institutions supporting — or opposing — his goals.
In the case of foreign policy, the Republican Party’s elites are mostly against Donald Trump’s vision. Before he took office, squadrons of Republican foreign-policy experts swore against serving under Trump. The top brass of the military is mostly against Trump’s vision for foreign policy, and those he brought into the administration tended to push him toward their views, or they walked out dramatically when he defied them.
The anti-interventionist and realist-“restrainer” camp that could have helped Trump achieve his goal of withdrawing troops is not concentrated in one political party. And it is still an insurgent cause. It was a dream of a few 1990s intellectuals and dissenting politicians. It got its political impetus from the failure of George W. Bush’s transformational vision of foreign policy and from subsequent failures in the Obama administration. Now it consists mostly of institutions, such as the Quincy Institute, that are only recently launched and that depend on people who despise Trump. It was only in the past few weeks that Trump managed to appoint an ambassador to Afghanistan, William Ruger, who shares the administration’s stated goals. Ruger, a Navy Reserve veteran who served in Afghanistan, has been the driver of the Charles Koch Institute’s efforts to promote a more humble foreign policy. I admire Ruger’s work and have sat in on some discussions he has hosted on these matters. This is an insurgent and fledgling movement.
The conservative judicial movement, by contrast, is long-lived and mature. Intellectual spadework began in the 1940s and ’50s. The political impetus came under the dramatic rulings of the Warren court, and ultimately in Roe v. Wade in 1973. As law schools continued to fall under the spell of successive progressive ideologies, the Federalist Society was founded in 1982 to identify and nurture conservative jurists.
The rise and nomination of Amy Coney Barrett is a testament to the work of generations of people tending to conservative institutions. It was a law professors such as John Garvey, a Federalist Society member who helped shape Notre Dame Law School, who identified Amy Coney Barrett as a great talent from her freshman year in 1994. It was those admiring professors who helped her get a clerkship with Antonin Scalia.
It is institutions such as the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at Notre Dame that help to build a community of trust among Catholic intellectuals over the years, and that motivate a reclusive traditionalist like myself, to jump to defend Barrett, a charismatic Catholic. That center’s leader, bioethicist O. Carter Snead, has been at the forefront of Barrett’s champions.
And of course it was conservative and pro-life activists who committed the Republican Party to the judiciary as a cause that was worth campaigning on. Those campaigns provided the political logic to Senators who are now proceeding with the Barrett nomination. Conservative institutions such as National Review provided the arguments for going ahead with the nomination.
Donald Trump once promised that he alone could fix Washington, D.C. But he never would have come up with Amy Coney Barrett had he been left to his own circle of friends and confidants. It required the Federalist Society, a determined and ambitious university, and the intervention of party stalwarts to accomplish the ACB nomination.