WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump could be about to face off against a familiar foe he sparred with when he was in office: Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.
Shapiro, now considered a potential running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris after President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, built his national profile when he was the commonwealth’s attorney general, filing challenges to Trump policies and battling his efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.
Shapiro’s battles with Trump “were a huge part of raising his profile and cementing a real track record on a lot of important issues,” said J.J. Abbott, who at the time was a spokesman for then-Gov. Tom Wolf.
Just days after he took office in 2017, Shapiro was part of the coalition of state attorneys general who opposed Trump’s proposed travel ban on people entering the country from Muslim-majority countries.
And as Trump left office four years later, Shapiro was heavily involved in efforts to push back against the many lawsuits questioning Biden’s victory, including in Pennsylvania itself.
“We did a lot of work together on a lot of different cases,” Brian Frosh, a Democrat who was Maryland’s attorney general at the time, said of Shapiro. “He’s very smart, very capable. He’s hard-working. He’s willing to take risks.”
When he ran for governor in 2022, “a big part of Shapiro’s appeal to voters was that he had taken on Trump and election deniers,” Frosh added. Shapiro’s Republican opponent, Doug Mastriano, was himself an election denier who had traveled to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Frosh said Shapiro’s investigation of sex abuse allegations against the Catholic Church was a blueprint for his own probe in Maryland.
Shapiro is just one example of how politicians have used the previously sleepy position of attorney general in recent years to catapult themselves into high-profile political careers. Other examples include Harris herself, who was attorney general of California. The approach has worked for Republicans, too, including Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who were their states’ attorneys general.
The easiest way for newly appointed attorneys general to make names for themselves these days is simple: generate national headlines by opposing the president in high-profile litigation.
That is exactly the approach Shapiro took.
He helped coordinate Democratic attorneys general as they supported lawsuits against the travel ban filed by attorneys general in Washington state and Virginia.
Democrats loudly condemned Trump’s policy, saying in part that it discriminated on the basis of religion by targeting Muslims. The ban was implemented after Trump pledged during the campaign to implement “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
At the time, the newly elected Shapiro brushed off concerns that joining the legal effort could harm him politically in a state Trump had won in the 2016 election.
“This filing is about keeping our communities safe, protecting our economy, and upholding the rule of law,” Shapiro said in a statement announcing the filing of one of the briefs against the travel ban.
Courts blocked Trump’s initial travel ban, allowing Shapiro and the other attorneys general to claim victory. (Trump later issued an amended travel ban, which Shapiro decided against challenging. It was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court.)
Shapiro, whose office declined to comment on his role as attorney general, continued to butt heads with Trump.
One lawsuit he helped lead targeted a Trump administration effort to undermine the Affordable Care Act’s so-called contraception mandate, which required employers to ensure that health insurance plans covered contraceptives. The administration issued a regulation that expanded religious and moral exemptions from the requirement.
The Supreme Court in 2020 ruled in favor of Trump on a 7-2 vote.
Shapiro found himself in the national spotlight again later that year as Trump and fellow Republicans fought in court both before and after the November election over voting-related issues.
One element of the pro-Trump election-denier narrative centered on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to extend the deadline for mail-in ballots to be received in the battleground state in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. The move was backed by Democrats, including Shapiro.
The conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court in October 2020 declined to intervene in Pennsylvania at the request of Republicans, but that did not stop the idea that Democrats had run roughshod over elections laws from taking hold on the right.
That led to a lawsuit Texas filed later in the year seeking to invalidate Biden’s election wins in key swing states, including Pennsylvania.
At the request of Shapiro and other state attorneys general, the Supreme Court quickly rejected that lawsuit, too.
“Our nation’s highest court saw through this seditious abuse of our electoral process,” Shapiro said at the time.
His involvement in the 2020 election cases “just solidified him as the Democratic front-runner and favorite” for the 2022 governor’s race, said David La Torre, a Republican consultant in the state.
“It certainly did him no harm,” he added.
