Released earlier this year, The Divider — a book co-authored by Susan Glasser of the New Yorker and Peter Baker of the New York Times — includes a revelation from former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen that Trump said "let’s just cancel” SF's Ninth Circuit court in 2018.
The "Red Wave'' Republicans hoped to ride into Congress never materialized. If anything, the maroon ripples emanating from this past Tuesday's midterm elections are becoming increasingly small. It's almost certain now that Democrats will hold onto the Senate; the majority count in the House remains undecided — and on a knife edge.
Democrats will retain control of the Senate after incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto was declared the winner of her closely contested race in Nevada. pic.twitter.com/noxV2WfwYx
— POLITICO (@politico) November 13, 2022
Last week's cast ballots were also a clear defiance against Trumpism, with most of the former president's endorsed picks failing to win their respective offices. As pundits, more or less, phrased it: The 2022 midterms were a call for normalcy in politics again.
Because yes: The Trump years were unhinged. One example of this was a recent revelation that the 45th president of the United States earnestly wanted to get rid of the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit court — one of the most progressive in the country — a year into his presidency.
The Chronicle recently wrote that in The Divider, a 2022 book by American journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser that delves into Trump's presidency from 2017 to 2021, it's mentioned that Trump told then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to "cancel” the appeals court.
Trump's desire to dissolve the court was, of course, spurred after his ego was bruised when the appeals court ruled against one of his 2018 orders around the deportation of immigrants seeking asylum in the United States.
Trump remarked that if specific legislation was needed to perform such a task, Nielsen would need to draft a bill to “get rid of the [fucking] judges,” and then go about sending it to Congress.
Nielsen did no such thing. Per the book, she “did not bother arguing” with Trump and simply ignored his demand. Nielsen expected Trump would forget about his improbable request.
It appears that's exactly what happened. Nielsen left her post in April 2019 amid Trump's whining that appointees were underperforming in their work to close the U.S.-Mexico border.
As the newspaper writes, Trump appointed 10 judges, all of whom skewed conservative, to the Ninth Circuit before leaving office. Now, the court holds 16 Democratic appointees among its 29 judges — 6 of which were appointed by Biden.
The population that makes up Ninth Circuit court's jurisdiction is 66,848,869, per the 2020 Census. Or, to put that figure into perspective: about a fifth of the current population of the United States of America.
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Photo: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump points to the crowd as he delivers a speech during the evening session on the fourth day of the Republican National Convention on July 21, 2016 at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump received the number of votes needed to secure the party's nomination. An estimated 50,000 people are expected in Cleveland, including hundreds of protesters and members of the media. The four-day Republican National Convention kicked off on July 18. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)