Question was asked in pb about why Trump got so many judicial appointments. Here is an article from June 2018 that explains the situation:
Senate obstructionism handed a raft of judicial vacancies to Trump—what has he done with them?
Donald Trump inherited 88 district and 17 court of appeals vacancies. Fourteen months later he proclaimed “when I got in we had over 100 federal judges that weren’t appointed. I don’t know why Obama left that … Maybe he got complacent.”
The reasons for the vacancies—old news to most—was the flimsy confirmation record in the 2015-16 Senate (the 114th), with its new Republican majority. Just as it refused to consider Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination, it shut down the lower court confirmation process. That’s water under the bridge. But documenting how the 114th Senate ratcheted up the contentiousness and polarization of an already broken confirmation process suggests how much harder it will be to ratchet it back into something with more comity and bipartisanship. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell now insists that there’s nothing “we can do …that’s more important … than confirming judges as rapidly as we get them.” Commentators boast that “Trump has had a massive impact on the federal bench.” The Republican majority refuses to grant Democratic senators privileges that Republicans and Democrats exploited vigorously in previous administrations.
Senate Democrats in turn are using their reduced arsenal of parliamentary maneuvers to slow down confirmations. If they get a Senate majority in divided government, confirmations will stop, long-term vacancies will proliferate, and sitting judges and litigants will pay the price.
The 114th’s record pales when compared to the final two years of the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush administrations. Then, as in 2015-16, the other party controlled the Senate. The 114th Senate both confirmed far fewer judges than its recent other-party predecessors and stopped confirming them at a much earlier point. Some of the 2016 vacancies Trump inherited occurred after any confirmation clock would have stopped. Still, of the 21 circuit vacancies he’s filled as of late May and others he soon will, up to seven could have had Obama appointees under pre-2015 norms. So too, up to 71 of the district vacancies he inherited and has only begun to fill could have had Obama appointees.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/06/04/senate-obstructionism-handed-judicial-vacancies-to-trump/