Trump’s list of judges contained a glaring omission:
Running for reelection in 2020, Donald Trump’s slogan was “Promises Made. Promises Kept.”
He certainly kept one promise. On May 18, 2016—and again in September of that year—Trump promised his supporters explicitly that, if elected, he would not appoint a Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court.
I can already hear snuffling noises off to my right protesting that he did no such thing, that Trump actually, as he said at the time, named highly qualified federal judges “representative of the kind of constitutional principles I value.”
Yet it is a fact that the two lists his campaign developed with the counsel of conservative activists (which he had promised not to stray from in filling the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Court) contained not a single Black woman. Trump said nothing about excluding Black female judges. He just did it.
This is not a small point; the two Supreme Court lists are an important part of why Trump was elected president. He was not a natural candidate for white evangelical Christians to embrace—nor was he the beau ideal of the conservative legal movement. But once the lists came out, along with his promise to hew to them, religious-right leaders, white evangelical voters in the pews, and many conservatives of the Federalist stripe boarded the Trump Train, clearing the path to his nomination that June.
That list was eight men and three women.
That list was all white.
During the fall campaign, when Trump was facing strong headwinds, he re-rang the Supreme Court bell by releasing, on September 23, a new list of potential nominees. The eleven names included one Black man, one Latino man, and one Indian American man. There was also one (and only one) woman, who was white.
There was no Black woman.
Trump campaigned on his promised judicial nominations. In August, he told a rally in Ashburn, Virginia, “Even if you can’t stand Donald Trump, even if you think I’m the worst, you’re going to vote for me. You know why? Judges …”
The point, of course, is that all the caterwauling about Biden refusing to consider the most qualified people once again exposes their bigotry. Trump laid out a huge list of all the people he supposedly felt were the most qualified. And not one Black woman made the list.