In the disheveled basement of a Capitol Hill rowhouse, amid piles of old newspapers and conservative tomes and computer equipment, Mike Davis leaned into a live microphone.
In front of the eagle-emblazoned backdrop familiar to fans of the far-right “War Room” podcast, the lawyer-turned-right-wing provocateur delivered his trademark tirade against Donald Trump’s legal and political opponents, whom he mocks as wild-eyed gluttons brandishing multiple indictments against the former president.
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If Trump again contests the results of the election, Davis is likely to be at the forefront of the legal battle.
“This guy is tough as hell,” Trump said, calling Davis out by name at a campaign event last week in Colorado, where he lives most of the time. “We want him in a very high capacity.”
During his first term, Trump turned to the Federalist Society and its longtime leader Leonard Leo, the traditional gateways for conservative and libertarian lawyers to the bench, for help finding nominees who would steer the courts to the right and forge a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. But as he strained to overturn his 2020 defeat and battled four indictments and a civil fraud case, Trump’s relationship with the conservative legal establishment frayed.
Davis eagerly stepped into the breach, amplifying the former president’s calls for “retribution” and vowing to help him pick “fearless” judges at a time when Trump complains even Republican-appointed judges are too “impartial.”
Trump, in turn, has embraced Davis, who as a Senate attorney helped move hundreds of his appointments to the federal branch, including the deeply divided confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. The former president has shared Davis’s social media posts nine times this year, referred to him as a legal scholar, and even privately floated his name in as a possible attorney general. Campaign records show a political committee controlled by Trump gave $150,000 this year to one of Davis’s nonprofits, which has been airing Spanish-language television ads that evoke Trump’s threats against illegal immigrants.
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His work for Gorsuch helped him land a job in 2017 as the chief nominations counsel for Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee.
That put him center stage as Trump blitzed the federal courts with Federalist Society-blessed appointments. Davis oversaw floor votes for 278 nominees to the courts and administration, including a record number of circuit judges confirmed during Trump’s first two years in office.
After one year on the Judiciary Committee, Davis was tasked with spearheading the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Kavanaugh, whose ascension would cement the conservative majority long pursued by the right — and Davis’s reputation as a pro-Trump attack dog. But a shocking allegation threatened to derail the nomination: a psychology professor from California named Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of groping her and trying to take off her clothes when they were both in high school.
Davis became one of the nominee’s fiercest defenders. He told The Post he didn’t believe Blasey Ford, but also argued that Kavanaugh’s behavior as a teenager shouldn’t be disqualifying. “There was no way in hell I was going to let Kavanaugh fail, even if the allegations were true,” he said.
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“Republican Judges are very often afraid to do the right thing,” Trump said on social media in January. “They go out of their way to show they are totally impartial, to the point of making really bad and unfair decisions.”
In his interview with The Post, Davis said that in a second term, Trump should pick judges “who are even more bold, who are even more fearless” and unafraid of “the blowback from the liberal media and the outside groups.” On the right, where claims of a political vendetta by the Biden administration against Trump and his allies are eagerly embraced, Davis has become one of the most extreme voices.
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