Saunders: Trump more successful when he doesn’t follow his gut

Critics have hit Trump for “outsourcing” his Supreme Court pick. But the decision to consult with top conservative legal minds to develop a list, which Trump later expanded twice, has helped the administration avoid surprises and allowed Trump to pick from the cream of the judicial pool.

As a result, activists on the other side of the aisle had time — months in the case of Gorsuch, and two years in the case of Kavanaugh — to dig through the records of both men, who were on Trump’s first list.

Indeed, the Trump list was so transparent that pro-abortion activists announced they would protest Trump’s pick even before they knew who it would be.

Barring a surprise, the outcome seems clear as well. Kavanaugh is likely to win confirmation, even though Republicans hold only a slim majority of 51 in the Senate and one member — Sen. John McCain of Arizona — has brain cancer and has not been able to cast a vote in the Senate this year.

Pro-abortion groups are running ads urging GOP Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who support abortion rights, to oppose Kavanaugh. The judge, it should be noted, testified in 2006 that if confirmed to the Circuit Court in Washington, D.C., he “would follow Roe v. Wade faithfully and fully.”

Both Collins and Murkowski voted for Gorsuch and voted to confirm Kavanaugh in 2006. It’s hard to imagine them rejecting the judge.

Shrewd judgment

In his selection of Kavanaugh, Trump picked someone with impeccable credentials who is likely to win the nomination and bring credit to Trump’s judgment. If only he would use this model for all major administration posts. A number of Trump’s picks reveal shrewd judgment — Pompeo, Vice President Mike Pence, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao — but others seem driven by an urge to throw caution to the wind.

Trump’s roll-the-dice decision to nominate his White House doctor, Ronny Jackson, to head the Department of Veterans Affairs, for instance, apparently was based on the president’s admiration of Jackson’s performance briefing the press corps on Trump’s health.

Then there’s flash White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, whom Trump fired 10 days after hiring him. It seems Trump’s idea of a communications wizard didn’t realize it’s a bad idea to badmouth White House higher-ups to a reporter without stipulating that the conversation is off the record.

When Trump named Rex Tillerson as his choice for secretary of state before Pompeo, observers hoped it would be a brilliant outside-the-box move, especially as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recommended the former Exxon chief executive. But Tillerson never was able to transition to diplomacy, meaning that in some spheres of the globe a year of foreign policy was lost.

The worst part is even a casual observer could have predicted disaster, Rice’s admiration notwithstanding. As Trump basks in the glory of his Kavanaugh pick, one can only hope he will realize that some decisions have too much consequence to go with your gut.