De facto Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has released the names of 11 people he would consider nominating to the Supreme Court should he be elected president.
Only one of them, as far as we know, has publicly called the candidate "Darth Trump."
The list includes conservative federal and state judges, all "representative of the kind of constitutional principles I value," Trump said in a statement.
NPR's inimitable legal correspondent Nina Totenberg will be posting later Wednesday with a full analysis of the names on the list and what Trump might be signaling with those names.
In the meantime, we can all amuse ourselves with a look at one name in particular: Don Willett, a justice on Texas' Supreme Court and a champion tweeter.
Last year, he couldn't even bear to think about whom Trump might suggest for the highest court in the land.
And now ... he's on the long list.
As multiple news organizations have noted, Willett has repeatedly mocked Trump on Twitter. (We first saw it on Vox; that piece cites eagle-eyed political reporters Betsy Woodruff and Jennifer Bendery.)
Willett is famously prolific and personable on Twitter. In 2014, an opinion writer for The New York Times spoke to Willett about his social media presence.
The judge described himself as "probably the most avid judicial tweeter in America — which is like being the tallest munchkin in Oz." He also said he "avoids partisan commentary," as the Times' Jesse Wegman put it.
Well. Maybe not completely.
Not all of his tweets about Trump are derogatory.
And of course, most of Willett's tweets have nothing to do with the apparent Republican nominee. They're about his family, his everyday life, Star Wars, the legal world ... or general exhaustion with the 2016 campaign.
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