Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has quietly fallen out with a longtime ally after the former friend and staunch Donald Trump supporter attacked another conservative on the court.
Gorsuch was closely aligned for years with Mike Davis, a combative Republican legal activist who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, and whose name was floated as a potential attorney general pick at the beginning of Trump’s second term.
Davis, 48, met Gorsuch while working in former President George W. Bush’s Office of Political Affairs and helped the future Supreme Court justice land his first federal judgeship in 2006, according to The Washington Post.
Before and during Trump’s first term, Davis lobbied to get Gorsuch on the president’s shortlist of possible nominees for the Supreme Court.
After Gorsuch was announced as Trump’s first Supreme Court pick, Davis helped him navigate the Senate confirmation process, and then Gorsuch returned the favor by choosing Davis to serve as one of his inaugural Supreme Court clerks. Much of Davis’ career as a Republican activist has been taxpayer-funded, including stints working as an intern for Newt Gingrich during Bill Clinton’s impeachment, George W. Bush’s Department of Justice, and the Senate Judiciary Committee under Iowa’s nonagenarian senator, Chuck Grassley.
The two men were so close that Gorsuch nicknamed Davis “the general,” but last year the relationship soured over the few times when the Supreme Court voted to rein in the Trump administration, The Washington Post reported.
After Trump appointee Justice Amy Coney Barrett sided with the court’s liberals on a pair of cases, Davis called her a “rattled law professor,” which upset Gorsuch, according to a source who spoke to the Post.
Another said Davis became angry when Gorsuch voted to block Trump’s attempt to deport a group of Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority that allows the president to detain or deport citizens of hostile foreign nations.
The extent of the rupture became clear when Gorsuch hosted a gathering for his former clerks and Davis wasn’t there. The sources gave differing accounts of whether Davis was denied an invitation or chose not to attend, according to the Post.
In an interview with the newspaper, Davis declined to answer questions about his relationship with Gorsuch.
He did, however, blast the court for “following politics and vanity projects instead of the law” after the justices expressed skepticism about Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The Daily Beast has also reached out to Davis and the Supreme Court for comment.
Inflammatory rhetoric against Trump’s real and perceived political opponents is nothing new for Davis.
After Trump won re-election, he declared that he wanted to “drag” Democrats’ “dead political bodies through the streets, burn them, and throw them off a wall. (Legally, political, and finally, of course)” and threatened to jail New York Attorney General Letitia James.
In May, Trump shared a video on Truth Social in which Davis described former President Barack Obama as “the most demonic force in American politics in decades.”
As of February, the Supreme Court had sided with the president 84 percent of the time.
But in the rare cases in which the Supreme Court ruled against Trump—including blocking his National Guard deployment to American cities and striking down his use of emergency powers to impose crushing tariffs on products from dozens of U.S. trade partners—the president has gone scorched earth on the justices.
After the tariff ruling, Trump told reporters he was “ashamed” of Gorsuch and Barrett, who joined Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberal justices in the 6-3 decision.
“I think it’s an embarrassment to their families, you want to know the truth,” he said.
He also criticized their lack of “loyalty” in a May post on Truth Social.
