The Nation: Donald Trump is poised to become the first president since FDR to have appointed the majority of high-court justices. His potential picks are terrifying.This article appears in the March 2025 issue, with the headline “The Supreme Trump Court.” Donald Trump’s first term as president gave the republicans control over the most dangerous body of the most dangerous branch of government: the Supreme Court. With the help of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, along with timely retirements and untimely deaths, Trump was able to secure a 6–3 hard-right majority on the court and use it to make the Republicans’ least-popular policy dreams come true. In the brief years since, the court has undermined labor rights, stripped back voting rights, and reduced pregnant people to the status of second-class citizens whose bodies can be controlled by Republican state legislatures eager to use them for labor without compensation.The Democrats might have used Joe Biden’s four-year interregnum to begin to claw back the Supreme Court from the Republicans’ grip. Particularly during the first two years, with the Democrats in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, they could have added additional justices to the court. Had they done so, abortion rights could have been saved, voting rights could have been protected, and Trump may have been ruled ineligible to ever run for office again. Instead, the Democrats did nothing. As the Supreme Court revealed its full moral turpitude to a disgusted public, Congress failed to impose even minimal ethical standards on the justices or cut the court’s funding, while Biden sent court expansion to die in a useless commission. Now we will experience a time of consequences. Vulnerable communities will pay the price for the Democrats’ inaction—and as bad as the court’s rulings have been in recent years, they are likely to get worse..In the case of either of these events, the Supreme Court will not just have a Republican majority by 2029, when Trump leaves office; it will likely have a Trump majority. Trump is now poised to become the first president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to have appointed a majority of the justices on the Supreme Court. His justices will outlive him, and their impact on law and policy will outlast whatever temporary tragedies Trump brings forth through his executive orders. To have that kind of decades-long impact, Trump will require some help from the current Republican justices who are past their sell-by date. Clarence Thomas is 76. Sam Alito is 74. John Roberts just turned 70, and while he is unlikely to retire, life starts to get a bit less certain when you hit your eighth decade. Republican lawmakers and Trump himself will actively pressure these Republican justices to retire and offer them golden parachutes or whatever else their corrupt little hearts desire….Still, in the cauldron of contenders for the nation’s highest court, there are a few names that keep bubbling to the top. Let’s discuss the five most likely people Trump could nominate to entrench one-party Republican rule on the court…”