Trump’s Judicial Blitz Loses Steam

President Donald Trump is getting judges confirmed at an even faster clip than he did at the beginning of his first term — but he’s making less of an impact on the judiciary.

Trump’s ability to reshape the federal judiciary was one of the crowning achievements of his first term. Aided by the GOP Senate and years of vetting by the conservative legal movement, he appointed more than 200 judges, including three Supreme Court justices.

By the numbers alone, Trump 2.0 is off to an even stronger start. The Senate confirmed 26 judges in 2025, compared to 19 in the first year of Trump’s first term. But the overwhelming majority of those judges sit on district courts. There simply aren’t as many of the more coveted and more powerful appeals court spots to fill as there were in 2017. That reality, along with more steadfast resistance from Democrats, suggests Trump won’t be able to make as big of an impact on the courts this time around.

“This is not going to be the same kind of earth shaking four years … we saw in his first four years, when he really did turn the judiciary around in terms of the percentage of judges appointed by Republicans as opposed to Democratic presidents,” said Russell Wheeler, a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies program.

Trump came into office in 2017 with more than 100 judicial vacancies waiting for him, including a Supreme Court seat, thanks largely to Sen. Mitch McConnell’s blockade of then-President Barack Obama’s nominees. He inherited only about 40 vacancies for his current term, fewer than any president since Ronald Reagan.

Trump appointed 12 appeals-court judges in 2017 — more than any president has gotten in their first year since 1945, according to the Congressional Research Service. He has been able to appoint only six so far in his second term.

There are also fewer vacancies opening up over the course of Trump’s second term. Federal judges — including Republican appointees — have been retiring at an unusually slow pace since Trump’s second inauguration, according to federal data and research by Derek Muller, a University of Notre Dame law professor who has tracked vacancies by recent presidential administrations.

“The thing that's most striking is the appointees of Republican presidents have not been in a rush to assume senior status, which you would expect in a normal Republican administration,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.

President Joe Biden saw a flurry of retirements in the months after his inauguration, inheriting just 46 vacancies but ending his first year with more than 70 open seats. At least three Democrat appointees have even denied Trump the opportunity to replace them by reversing their previous plans to step down.

A spokesperson for the Senate Judiciary Committee told POLITICO that the panel has advanced judicial nominees as fast as it has received them, saying the only reason the Senate hasn’t confirmed more judges is because the White House hasn’t nominated them. Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley of Iowa has made the same complaint.

The White House told POLITICO more nominees are on the way.

“In the face of historic Democrat obstruction, the Trump Administration has still been wildly successful confirming nominees,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said. “With 26 nominees confirmed, the Administration has already surpassed the pace … from the first Trump Administration and we’re just getting started.”

Democrats agree that they’ve stepped up their resistance to Trump’s nominees in his second term. Trump has railed against the Senate’s “blue slips,” a tradition that allows senators to effectively block the confirmation of a nominee to district courts in their home state.

Still, unless Democrats are able to retake the Senate in this year’s midterms, the White House has plenty of time to make more impact.

“In President Trump’s first term, he set a precedent of nominating highly qualified nominees to help reform the federal judiciary, and his second term is no different,” said Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri), a member of the Judiciary Committee. “I’m proud to see four nominees for vacancies in Missouri be filled before the end of the year and I’m confident the White House will continue to select excellent nominees to serve across the country.”