The most conventional feature of Donald Trump’s first term was his judicial nominations. That has mostly been true of his second term nominations — well-credentialed conservative lawyers with little connection to Trump or the MAGA movement generally. His Supreme Court nominations last time around attracted the usual flak, but lower court nominees flew under the radar.

That is not so of his recent nomination of Emil Bove to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Bove’s nomination advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee amid the kind of Democratic uproar typically reserved for Supreme Court picks. Why? On paper, Bove holds the same elite credentials as any of the 55 other judges Trump appointed to the appeals courts. Federal clerkships, a few years at a big law firm, a stretch as an assistant US attorney — all bog-standard for up-and-coming lawyers with an eye on higher office.

What sets Bove apart, though, is his loyalty to Trump. As a deputy attorney general in the second Trump administration, Bove has overseen or advised in some of the firings in various branches of the federal government designed to remove employees whom the administration sees as not aligned with its goals. He was also involved in the decision not to prosecute New York mayor Eric Adams for alleged bribery, a decision that led multiple federal prosecutors to resign in protest.

Senate Democrats cannot stop Trump from firing federal employees, and the Supreme Court has so far mostly found those actions to be within the executive’s power. They can’t stop Trump from letting Adams off the hook, either. So they now direct their ire at Bove, the Trump loyalist who has carried out the President’s will.

Trump knows exactly what he is doing. Having largely gotten his way on reducing the government workforce, he’s now forcing the Senate to confirm the man who has done the dirty work. He will likely succeed in this, too.

There are two themes at work here, neither of which is without precedent. First, Trump feels betrayed by the conservative legal establishment. He worked hand in glove with the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo to select judges in the first term, and the partnership was a great success. The high court’s decision in Dobbs alone validated the deal for a conservative legal movement that had been working to overturn Roe v. Wade for decades.

But Trump and Leo fell out after it became clear that Leo and other originalists were more loyal to the law than to the man. Second term appointments, both judicial and executive, have gone to conservatives, but with more emphasis on loyalty to the President. Bove checks both boxes. In this, he is not much different from many of Franklin Roosevelt’s nominations to a federal government he hoped to radically transform.

Second, the nomination is a revenge pick. An “in your face” to the opposition. This may be unseemly to the ladies and gentlemen of the Senate Democratic caucus, but it is also not without precedent in American history. Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the DC Circuit in 1982 enraged Democrats as much as Bove’s does today, for similar reasons dating back to Bork’s service in the Nixon administration. Likewise, Joe Biden’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland as attorney general was a rebuke to the Senate Republicans who declined to confirm him to the Supreme Court five years earlier.

Motivations aside, both Bork and Garland did their jobs well. The presidents who nominated them may have done so to make a political point, but that did not diminish either man’s qualifications or ability. Bove will both inflame the opposition and perform the job well — perhaps the Platonic ideal of a political nominee in these hyperpartisan times.