U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) ridiculed President Trump’s verbal attacks against the Federalist Society and conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, a legal powerbroker who assisted Clarence Thomas in his Supreme Court confirmation hearings and led campaigns to support the nominations of John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
Note: During his first administration, in 2016, Trump said: “We’re going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by the Federalist Society.”
After the Supreme Court, which has given Trump some big wins, recently ruled against some aspects of his agenda on the issues of immigration and tariffs, Trump swiftly — and irately — changed his tune on Leo and the Federalist Society.
On Truth Social, Trump called the longtime vice president of the Federalist Society “a real sleazebag” and “a bad person,” and has claimed a “judiciary coup.”
On the podcast Legal AF, Whitehouse called Trump’s attacks against Leo “hysterical, in every literal sense of that word.”
Whitehouse on Trump’s attacks on Leonard Leo: This whole thing is hysterical—in every literal sense of that word.
The fact that Trump is furious with him right now may just have to do with the fact that Leo-aligned groups brought the tariff suit and lined up against Trump on… pic.twitter.com/8pEtgBA1j8
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 2, 2025
Whitehouse added: “The fact that Trump is furious with him right now may just have to do with the fact that Leo-aligned groups brought the tariff suit and lined up against Trump on that.
“But it also may signal a dawning realization by Donald Trump: that he actually might not have truly chosen his Supreme Court appointees. That Leonard Leo and Don McGahn, his White House counsel who were running that process and doing the selection, might actually have been really the agents of somebody completely else. And that Trump was the chump in the scheme, who did not know he was being played by the wily Koch brothers and the billionaire interests behind Leonard Leo.”
Note: Don McGahn served as White House counsel for Trump during the first administration, until he resigned. In January 2018, The New York Times reported that in June 2017 the president asked McGahn to instruct top Justice Department officials to dismiss special counsel Robert Mueller, and that McGahn refused, instead threatening to resign.