The Trump era of American politics is defined to some degree by controversies that are both unsurprising and, in their unprecedented context, unusually revealing.

For instance: Last week in Texas, the Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton fired an opening salvo on behalf of eleven states, suing the federal government over its decision to prohibit school districts from discriminating against transgender students. In so doing, Paxton traveled far afield from the state’s capital city of Austin to a federal district court 300 miles north, ostensibly because the one judge in that division, Reed Charles O’Connor, is well known for his hostility to the cause of LGBT equality.

That several states would challenge the Education Department’s guidance will surprise no one who’s familiar with the rampant litigiousness of the conservative movement during the Obama era. Neither will the fact that a state attorney general quite transparently forum-shopped the case in order to draw a judge whose biases are widely known—a judge who offers the states their best hope of prevailing eventually before the Supreme Court. (Texas used the same ploy to lay a challenge to Obama immigration policy before an avowedly restrictionist federal judge hundreds of miles south of Austin.)

But against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s candidacy, these predictable developments take on fresh significance. They suddenly represent not just aspects of a strategy to constrain the Obama administration, but something far broader: a hunger for judicial power that’s strong enough to overwhelm conservative skepticism of Trump’s race-driven authoritarianism.

As lawyers were preparing the anti-transgender lawsuit, Trump was engaging in a campaign of harassment against Gonzalo Curiel—a different federal judge in California presiding over a pair of cases alleging fraud against Trump and his defunct, eponymous “university.” Trump’s provocation against Curiel, repeatedly and publicly questioning his judicial impartiality in the case because he is of “Mexican” heritage, is another development that’s both predictable and fraught with new meaning. It’s the first racist imbroglio of the general election—a controlled test of the theory that Trump might run a very different kind of campaign for the presidency than he did for the Republican nomination.