The Daily Fuckup

By March 14, 2022, the fight over Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination was already taking on a familiar shape in Trump-world: a serious constitutional proceeding was being converted into a grievance machine. Jackson was entering the early phase of what was always going to be a bruising confirmation battle, because any seat on the nation’s highest court draws scrutiny, ideological combat, and partisan brinkmanship. But the response from Trump-aligned figures quickly made clear that the objective was not simply to interrogate the nominee’s record or qualifications. The more visible instinct was to manufacture outrage, strip away context, and turn a consequential hearing into a culture-war stage show. That may be useful if the goal is to keep a loyal base animated by conflict, but it looks far less convincing when judged as an argument about the Court itself.

That distinction matters because Supreme Court confirmations are not ordinary political skirmishes. A lifetime appointment to the high court carries enormous legal and institutional weight, and the process is supposed to reflect that gravity even when the country is deeply polarized. In theory, these moments reward discipline, seriousness, and at least some attention to the nominee’s professional history and judicial record. In practice, Trump-era politics has repeatedly treated such moments as opportunities to relive the outrage politics that defined the previous several years. The formula is recognizable by now: imply misconduct without fully proving it, collapse nuance into suspicion, frame the nomination as an existential threat, and keep the spotlight fixed on the loudest reaction possible. That tactic can produce heat, clips, and social-media churn, but it does not amount to a substantive case. It is grievance politics dressed up as scrutiny, and the costume is usually thin enough for everyone to see through.

The Jackson fight also exposed a broader problem for Republicans trying to navigate the post-Trump landscape. In a narrow sense, the party could have used the moment to demonstrate that it still had some ability to approach a major Supreme Court battle with restraint and institutional seriousness. Instead, the more visible instinct in Trump-world was to default to outrage as a substitute for argument, as if volume alone could make a weak case look strong. That strategy may satisfy activists who prefer combat to deliberation, but it sends a different message to voters watching from outside the most committed circles. It suggests that the point is not to assess the nominee in good faith, but to stage yet another round of performative anger for political consumption. For moderates and for anyone not already immersed in the outrage economy, the whole operation can look cheap and transparent. It says the goal is spectacle, not standards. It says the purpose is resentment, not analysis. And for Republicans still trying to distance themselves from the most corrosive habits of the Trump years, that is a serious political liability.

The danger is not just that the attacks look overblown. It is that the style itself weakens the institution and eventually the people doing the attacking. Once every major confirmation becomes a theater piece, the public starts to assume bad faith before the arguments even begin. That may energize the people who want every contest to feel like a fight, but it also lowers the credibility of the critics and lowers the level of the debate. Instead of hearing an argument about jurisprudence, qualifications, or judicial philosophy, viewers get a familiar loop of insinuation, outrage, and performance. Over time, that makes the process feel smaller and the participants look less interested in governing than in feeding an outrage machine. In that sense, the Jackson nomination was never only about Jackson. It became a test of whether Trump-aligned politics could resist turning a historic appointment into cheap performance art, or whether every serious institution would continue to be treated as a prop. So far, the evidence pointed in one direction. Trump-world did not just flirt with theatrics; it embraced them, and it did so in a way that revealed more about its own habits than about the nominee it was trying to attack.