President Donald Trump had 34 Article III federal judges appointed and confirmed by April 1 of the second year of his second term, putting his pace behind the average for modern second-term presidents but still among the fastest since Bill Clinton. The tally was the third-most through that point in the second terms of presidents going back to Clinton.
The numbers show where Trump has moved quickly and where he has not. By the same date, Barack Obama had 64 appointees confirmed, while George W. Bush had 29 confirmations. The average for presidents through April 1 of the second year of a second term was 44 judges, and Trump’s 34 sat below that mark.
The biggest gap was at the Supreme Court. George W. Bush was the only president to have appointed a Supreme Court justice by this point in a second term, and he had appointed two. Trump had not, though his pace in lower courts was steadier than Bush’s in some categories and weaker than Obama’s in others.
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Article III federal judges hold life terms after presidential nomination and Senate confirmation under the Constitution, and the category includes the Supreme Court, U.S. courts of appeals, U.S. district courts and the U.S. Court of International Trade. That makes the comparison more than a count of vacancies filled. It is a measure of how deeply each president can shape the federal bench before the second term even reaches its midpoint.
The appellate courts show how mixed Trump’s results were. The median number of U.S. Court of Appeals appointees by this point was nine, but Trump had six. Obama had 14. Bush had fewer lower-court judges in other places, with 19 U.S. District Court appointees compared with Obama’s 48 and a median of 33.
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The tension in the data is that Trump’s total is strong enough to rank near the top, yet not strong enough to match the pace set by the fastest second-term benchmark. That leaves the central question answered plainly: his judicial effort was significant, but it was not the most aggressive second-term push in the modern era, and it fell short of Obama’s pace by a wide margin.
