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That's congress's doing, not Trump's. All he did was sit in the chair. Any old stooge could have done that, and for less!
hence I wrote, "Of course, this was not contingent on Trump per say."
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What do you mean? The president does nominate the person.
Right but any conservative president would have done the same. It's congress that made sure he got to nominate three instead of two.
any other "conservative president" would have lost in 2016 making this whole point moot anyway
"if only Trump didn't have X, Y, Z, and was A, B,C, he would be great" or "he just did stuff another GOP person would have done" counterfactuals as reasons to discount things he did or put space between things you like and things you don't like aren't strong arguments because other "conservative" president or GOP nominee would have lost in 2016 and the US would have been in the 2nd term
you would prefer a nicer, polished Trump? you think another guy in his place woulda done something he did you like anyway? okay, well that guy would have lost and it would be the 2nd term of Hillary Clinton right now
I disagree. If Trump hadn't run, we could have ended up with a boring normal republican who would have almost certainly won against doomed candidate Hillary Clinton. Of course no candidate in 2016's primary was equipped to deal with his shenanigans or frankly live in the meme economy at all.
There are things I wish he'd done differently, even adjusting for our obvious political differences. I wish he'd kept turnover lower and cultivated effective leaders he could delegate to. I wish he'd handled Covid differently rather than deferring to states and letting the CDC go off on adventures. I wish he'd had a more pragmatic plan to deal with China. I wish he'd thought more carefully about his responsibility as a leader to set the stage for future leaders who aren't him.
A boring normal Republican would have been railroaded and lost because he wouldn't fight, just like Mitt Romney did in 2012 and John McCain did in 2008. And just like Mitt Romney was so mediocre the GOP couldn't take the Senate despite maybe the best metrics and seats to do so in decades, a normal Republican would not have won healthy majorities in Congress either.
If you look at the other likely Candidates in the absence of Trump, they would have lost the midwest. If they lost the midwest, they lose the election. Which one do you think would have turned unlikely voters who voted Obama in 2008 and 2012 into GOP voters? Certainly not Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush.
Trump was being impeached at the start of covid. He was regularly being threatened by his own party with removal if he changed the leadership at the CDC. Because of that, what he did was create a parallel group which oversaw stats reporting to stop the CDC from lying about it.
You may wish he did X, Y, or Z, and I certainly do, but we must remember what really happened during the COVID hysteria.
Romney and McCain were both up against the incredible charisma of Barak Obama. Either could have won handily over Clinton. Remember, Clinton lost to Obama and never really became a more compelling candidate afterwards.
So in other words, dick-all.
The rudderless response of a people with no leader.
Rubio?
the tea party came storming in to take back the house in 2010 because of how disastrously bad Obama's policies were and this was even more true in 2012
based on what? the only single thing you've said is Hillary was unlikeable
okay, so what?
doing "dick-all" would have been far better than 99% of other GOP who were active participants in the covid hysteria
the "leaders" were going full steam ahead to hysteria; almost every single one across almost every institution in western society
rubio couldn't even do it in Florida, so no
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Trump's polling and performance in the midwest, something which was necessary for the GOP candidate to win, and something with which every other candidate in the heavily contested primary did far worse in
Trump captured just enough Obama voters in the midwest to win. Which of the other likely candidates was going to do that? Not Cruz, not Rubio, not Jeb, not Kasich outside of Ohio. And that's assuming they would have performed as good as Trump did in other states outside of their "native" regions. Trump, alone, was the person pushing polices which most Americans cared about but which the other candidates were doing their best to ignore (immigration and trade being the main ones).
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Disagree, other establishment conservative presidents have made worse (especially in retrospect) selections. Remember Harriet Miers?
Isn't that shift a result of the work of the Federalist Society, which basically picked every conservative SC justice after Miers?
Partly, but no they do not pick them. Trump picked them from their recommendations. So far he is the only Republican president to commit to doing so and follow through. It's just too tempting to play patron with them.
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And yet Trump managed to not fuck it up where other establishment Republicans have, by wanting to nominate friends of friends or reward political favors.
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Nobody is saying that the Senate wasn't involved. They obviously are. @pusher_robot was pointing out that it's untrue to say that Trump wasn't involved, and that it was all Congress' doing.
Trump was given a curated list to pull names from.
Mitch held a seat and Trump did what he was told. The one, huge, unequivocally great thing he did wasn't him, because you have to be delusional at this point to think Trump is good at doing anything but trolling the hell out of the libs.
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We're evaluating Trump as a potential "leader of the populist right", and Supreme Court nominations are entirely unrelated to one's competency in that role, as Evinceo notes.
Except to the degree that you can get yourself elected as President, in which case just say that, instead of how he "appointed an unprecedented three SCOTUS judges in a single term and others".
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