As the Catholic Church in the United States grapples with the implications of the first American pope, another important development affecting American Catholics has gone largely unnoticed: the death of the decades-long project of neoconservative Catholic elites to dominate and dictate the policy debate within the Republican Party. The return of Donald Trump to the White House has exposed this contingent as committed enemies of Trump’s America First populist agenda and subsequently reduced their influence with the new administration and within the GOP to a new level of irrelevance.

A standard trope of the Never-Trump Republicans who oppose the president’s successful reorientation of the party towards an America First agenda is to bemoan Trump’s supposed departures from “authentic conservatism.” Donald Trump’s devastating critique of the post-Reagan GOP’s uncritical endorsement of unlimited immigration, foreign interventionism, and so-called free trade earned him not only a new populist political coalition unrivaled since the Reagan era but also the undying enmity of establishment Republicans deeply invested in the failed neocon policy agenda. The only aspect of the first Trump administration exempt from their criticism was his handling of judicial appointments, since the choice of nominees to the Supreme Court and to the federal judiciary was largely delegated to billionaire and Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo, a stalwart Catholic neocon who has long acted as éminence grise with regard to constitutional law and judicial philosophy among establishment Republicans. In Trump’s first term, Leo used his networks and influence to push through the nominations of Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, all products of Leo’s Federalist Society. Three other members of the Court, including Chief Justice Roberts, also have Federalist Society pedigrees.

Although the President often touts his first-term appointments to the Court, the Trump appointees—particularly Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett—have often proven to be meddlesome obstacles to the implementation of his populist MAGA agenda. Already, early in his second term, the two justices have sided with the Court’s liberals on numerous crucial rulings, including one related to the deportation of illegal aliens. Barrett and Chief Justice Roberts joined the progressives to prevent the freezing of foreign aid spending not in alignment with the administration’s priorities. Those rulings, which caused a popular uproar among Trump supporters, merely highlight the yawning gap between the libertarian-leaning, pro-corporate, and laissez-faire judicial philosophy of Leo’s Federalist Society and the jurisprudence of the rising generation of MAGA-oriented legal thinkers, more sympathetic to economic nationalism and the vigorous exercise of executive authority to protect vital national interests.