President Donald Trump’s two finalists for the Supreme Court offer him a choice between a pair of competing personal narratives: an Ivy League pedigree or a blue collar history.

With the president lacking any consistent judicial philosophy, those close to Trump are emphasizing their candidate’s life story as they attempt to sway Trump toward either Neil Gorsuch or Thomas Hardiman.


Gorsuch has the resume of a man seemingly destined for the high court: the son of a Reagan Cabinet member, a graduate of Harvard and Oxford, and a clerk for two Supreme Court justices who has worked in the Justice Department and spent a decade on the federal bench. In conservative legal circles, he is favored as a worthy intellectual heir to the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

Hardiman has blue-collar roots that his backers say would make him a quintessential Trump nominee: a native of a working-class industrial town in Massachusetts, the first in his family to graduate from college, and upwardly mobile without passing through the corridors of the Ivy League. He would be the only sitting justice who did not attend Harvard or Yale.

“If it’s Hardiman, the story will be ‘here’s a guy of modest means, from Western Pennsylvania [where he currently lives], typical Irish-Catholic family and here he is reaching the pinnacle of the legal profession,’” said Leonard Leo, who has been one of Trump’s top advisers in the Supreme Court search.

And if it is Gorsuch, Leo went on, “The story will be ‘Neil Gorsuch is an exceptional jurist whose work substantially reflects the jurisprudence, quality and style of Justice Scalia.’”

During the campaign, Trump largely outsourced the creation of his initial list of potential justices to the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, meaning all came with a stamp of conservative pre-approval.

Thomas Hardiman, 51, graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1987 and from Georgetown Law School in 1990. | AP Photo

“The list so simplifies things,” said one Republican closely tracking the search. “Nobody cares about which one it is” between Gorsuch and Hardiman.

Because Trump has no clear legal philosophy, the personal qualities of the candidates — and their personal chemistry with him — are playing an unusually outsized role in the lobbying and decision-making process. Hardiman also has the backing of Trump’s sister , fellow 3rd Circuit Court Judge Maryanne Trump Barry.

At the same time, one senior White House official insisted that “we are not as obsessed with bio as many” think and that “adherence to Constitution” remains “the first criterion” for Trump.

The president will unveil his closely-held choice in prime-time on Tuesday evening — an announcement he moved up two days amid fallout from the executive order he signed curbing refugees and others from seven majority-Muslim countries into the United States.

Of course, Trump being Trump, there is always a chance he has a surprise in store Tuesday night —

but at present Hardiman and Gorsuch are seen as the front-runners.

Those pushing Hardiman, including former presidential candidate Rick Santorum, are explicitly appealing to Trump’s populism.

“I just think this is a signature moment for the president,” said Santorum, who has been in touch with Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and other administration officials to lobby on Hardiman’s behalf.

“You wouldn’t know he’s a federal judge. You just wouldn’t,” Santorum said of Hardiman, who said he spent time with in Washington during the inauguration. Santorum said the responses when people met Hardiman were the same: “’That guy is going to go on the Supreme Court? He’s such a good guy, he’s such a real person.’”

“You have Gorsuch, who comes from a pedigree, a background — in the vernacular you would say he’s an elite — went to Columbia and Oxford and Harvard and clerked for the Supreme Court and his parents were in the Reagan cabinet which is a terrific pedigree…He would be a very traditional pick and would fit in with all the other Harvard and Yale-educated lawyers on the court,” Santorum said. “The one thing I’ve always liked about Tom is Tom is not your Harvard, Yale lawyer.”

Gorsuch remains the favorite in elite conservative legal circles, where many say the force and clarity of his prose makes him a fitting replacement for Scalia. “You have extrajudicial writings from Gorsuch that are a clearer window into his legal thought than there is for Hardiman,” said Jonathan Adler, a conservative professor of law at Case Western University.

Neil Gorsuch, 49, has his own non-Washington story, despite Supreme Court clerkships with justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy and the fact that his mother, briefly, headed the Environmental Protection Agency under Reagan. | AP Photo

With Hardiman, Adler said, “Some people on the right are concerned that because they don’t see those things makes him more of a stealth candidate, and that ‘stealth’ means Souter,” a reference to former Justice David Souter, a Republican appointee who ended up aligned with the court’s liberal bloc.

Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute, called Gorsuch “a really elegant writer known for turns of phrase.”

Hardiman, 51, graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1987 and from Georgetown Law School in 1990.

Gorsuch, 49, has his own non-Washington story, despite Supreme Court clerkships with justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy and the fact that his mother, briefly, headed the Environmental Protection Agency under Reagan.

The Federalist Society on Monday circulated talking points on both Gorsuch and Hardiman to key allies, which note that Gorsuch "worked as a furniture mover and as a front-desk clerk at a Howard Johnson hotel" during summer vacations in high school and college. “Avid outdoorsman who loves to fish, hunt and ski,” the notes read. Hardiman, the memo notes, is the son of a cab driver and "helped pay his way through law school by driving cabs."

Democrats have vowed to force Republicans to find 60 votes for whomever Trump nominates, as outside Republican groups are preparing to spend $10 million on ads targeting vulnerable Senate Democrats up for reelection in 2018 to support Trump’s nominee.

Because Trump is filling the seat vacated by Scalia, his nominee is not expected to switch the balance of power on the court on most matters. President Obama tried to fill that vacancy with Merrick Garland in 2016, but Republicans blocked him from ever receiving a hearing.

Trump, ever the showman, has tried to draw out the suspense until the end, even after he said Thursday he’d “made my decision pretty much in my mind.”

Trump’s dilemma left one former former George W. Bush administration official guessing.

"Hardiman gets the edge because he's a blue collar, up from his own bootstraps success story, with support from Trump's sister," the official said. "Gorsuch gets the edge because he's extraordinarily qualified, bright and conservative (Not a knock on Hardiman, who has a decent case on all fronts too).”

“Which one wins?” the official said. “I dunno!"