When Donald J. Trump became president in 2016, he pledged to appoint Supreme Court justices who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Three judges and six years later, he made good on that promise.
Mr. Trump also made a more general pledge about religion during that campaign. During a Republican debate, a moderator asked if he would “commit to voters tonight that freedom of religion will be an absolute litmus test for anyone you appoint, not just the Supreme Court, but all courts.”
Mr. Trump said he would, and a new study has found that he largely lived up to that assurance. Trump’s appointees in lower federal courts, the study found, voted more often in favor of religious freedom claims than not only Democratic appointees, but also judges appointed by other Republican presidents.
There was one exception: Muslim prosecutors fared worse for Trump appointees than for other judges.
“There seems to be a really big difference in how these things come out depending on the specific religion in question,” said Stephen J. Choi, a law professor at New York University who led the study with Mitu Gulati. from the University of Virginia and Eric A. Posner from the University of Chicago.
Another part of the study examined what characterized Trump’s lower court appointees, considering 807 justices appointed by seven presidents by the end of 2020.
For example, the study found that judges named by Trump had “stronger or more numerous religious ties” to churches and other places of worship, to religious schools, and to groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom and First Liberty, which have won a series of major awards. Supreme Court cases for Conservative Christians.
Trump appointees were also much more likely to be members of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, than other Republican appointees: 56 percent versus 22 percent.
For nominations to the Trump administration’s appeals court, the survey found membership in the group was “virtually required,” with the rate exceeding 88 percent, compared to 44 percent for other Republican appointees.
Mr Trump made another pledge during another debate in 2016 about the judges he would nominate. “They will respect the Second Amendment and what it stands for, what it represents,” he said.
The new study did not attempt to measure how Trump appointees voted on gun rights cases. But it did find that more than 9 percent of Trump appointees were members of the National Rifle Association, compared to less than 2 percent of other Republican appointees and less than 1 percent of Democratic appointees.
“In light of the polarizing nature of gun rights and the NRA’s association with extreme views on gun ownership,” the study’s authors wrote, “lawyers pursuing a reputation for impartiality would normally want to avoid membership in the NRA.”
The study did document how Mr. Trump’s appointees voted in cases involving religious freedom claims, examining about 1,600 votes in more than 500 cases in federal appeals courts between 2000 and 2022.
Trump appointees voted for plaintiffs who claimed their right to free religion had been violated in about 45 percent of cases, compared to 36 percent for other Republican appointees and 33 percent of Democratic appointees. The gap grew for cases involving only Christians to more than 56 percent, compared to 42 percent for other Republican appointees and 29 percent for Democratic ones.
And the numbers reversed when it came to Muslims, with Trump appointees at 19 percent, compared to 34 percent for other Republican appointees and 48 percent for Democratic ones.
“The pattern that emerges,” the study said, “is consistent with conventional wisdom: Democrats tend to protect minority religions, and Republicans tend to protect Christianity (and possibly Judaism).”
The study addressed a common criticism of Trump appointees: that they are less qualified than other judges. It found that the evidence did not support the charge, at least on average and at least as measured by the prestige of the law schools the judges attended, whether they had served as clerks, and ratings from the American Bar Association.
“We find little evidence that Trump judges break the historic pattern of judicial appointments,” the study authors wrote. “Women and minorities are less well represented among Trump judges than they are among Democratic judges, but that reflects a historic partisan difference; Trump judges are not much different from Republican judges in this regard.”
“A few more Trump judges got the highest ABA ratings, but not as many Trump judges went to the top-10 law schools,” the study said. “Our view is that the data does not support the view that Trump’s judges were less qualified than judges appointed by other presidents.”
But the main finding of the study, on religion, was that Mr. Trump kept his word.
“Trump is not known to be personally religious,” the study’s authors wrote, “but he seems to have believed he could get votes by promising to appoint religious judges, and he kept his promise.”