Trump picks a side he wants to be on ideologically. Hillary will have to do the same soon if she wants to win

It has become a common rant by more liberal-minded groups trying to stir up opposition to Donald Trump’s presidential dreams – he’ll appoint a whole slew of justices to the Supreme Court of the United States who will undo everything we have done.

Of course, there are conservative ideologues who don’t trust Trump – they think he’s just a little too big-city Manhattan-oriented to truly represent the concerns of the political party that likes to believe that big cities represent everything that’s wrong with this country.

SOME OF THEM even think Trump can’t be trusted to pick the kind of high court justices they want – the kind who can be counted on to rig the legal system to benefit their partisan political beliefs.

So it wasn’t a surprise that Trump this week made public a list of 11 judges whom he said would be his picks for the Supreme Court – should he get elected in the November general elections.

All 11 are judges who typically come up on the list of conservative political operatives when they dream about having courts that would view liberalism as some sort of crime.

It would seem that the list is part of a tactic by Trump to gain, if not the love, at least the tolerance, of the conservative ideologues whose preferred presidential candidates all were defeated by Donald back during the primary season.

IT IS A tactic to appease the people who might seriously give thought to backing a third-party presidential candidate or, worse yet, not even bother to vote at all.

Which actually is the strategy of the campaign of Hillary Clinton for president. Hope that the American people are so repulsed at Trump’s garishness that they don’t bother to vote – which could make their faction just large enough to win the general election.

I really don’t know how the election cycle will shake out by autumn, although I don’t think there is anyone who is really enthused about picking from either Trump or Clinton.

Then again, maybe I wasn’t alone in thinking that there wasn’t anyone in the running for president during any primary season who was worth my vote. It really was quite the collection of mediocrities that led us to this point of deciding to vote for the candidate less likely to make us spew chunks!

AS FOR TRUMP’S list of judges, it is predictable – a collection of names that only legal geeks would recognize. We’re going to have to take the word of political observers that the legal minds assembled here are truly ideologically hard-core enough to appease the kind of people who want rigid adherence to a law that favors them, and only them.

I don’t think the list means much, in and of itself.

But it is a gesture of the type that could get more people interested in bothering to cast a ballot for Trump. Get enough supporters, and Donald wins the right to live and work in the Oval Office for a four-year period.

Or perhaps it will be Clinton who will wind up having to make more gestures to try to appease enough would-be backers to bother to turn out to vote.

SOMEONE IS GOING to have to give the American people something in the way of a reason for people to bother to turn out to vote.

Because despite all those silly hats about “making America great again,” this is not an election cycle that will get the public all worked up.

This is one where I suspect many people are going to hold their noses pinched shut while casting their ballots, and others will spend their lives living down the shame over just how they will cast their ballot just over six months from now.

  -30-