At the New York Times, Adam Liptak and Maggie Haberman have a really interesting look at the Trump administration’s strategy for wooing Anthony Kennedy into retirement. It involved special attention to the justice’s former clerks (including Neil Gorsuch and various lower-court nominees); Trump also praised Kennedy even while insulting more conservative justices such as John Roberts.
There are also personal ties between Trump and Kennedy that were known but not widely reported until now, and that no doubt made things easier:
As he made his way out of the chamber, Mr. Trump paused to chat with the justice.
“Say hello to your boy,” Mr. Trump said. “Special guy.”
Mr. Trump was apparently referring to Justice Kennedy’s son, Justin. The younger Mr. Kennedy spent more than a decade at Deutsche Bank, eventually rising to become the bank’s global head of real estate capital markets, and he worked closely with Mr. Trump when he was a real estate developer, according to two people with knowledge of his role.
During Mr. Kennedy’s tenure, Deutsche Bank became Mr. Trump’s most important lender, dispensing well over $1 billion in loans to him for the renovation and construction of skyscrapers in New York and Chicago at a time other mainstream banks were wary of doing business with him because of his troubled business history.
Neera Tanden at the Center for American Progress, though, seems to read a little too much into this:
https://twitter.com/neeratanden/status/1012665534297624577
This gestures toward some sort of financial impropriety or corruption, but why would Kennedy’s son, as the employee of a bank, bribe Trump with an overly generous loan long before he was president? As the Financial Times has reported — in a piece noting some more-scintillating details, such as that Deutsche has run into some Russia-related legal troubles — Trump and Deutsche were a “good match” in the 1990s because “the bank saw a niche in serving rich developers who had hit a few bumps along the way.”