President Trump has unloaded on his own Supreme Court appointees, telling Time magazine that Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh have betrayed him with rulings he called “very disappointing” and “disastrous for the country.”
Trump, 78, sat down with the magazine for an interview published this week in which he contrasted his picks unfavorably with Democratic-appointed justices he said “stick like glue.” The president complained that Barrett, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh had voted against him too often after he gave them what he called “the position of a lifetime.”
“I put them in. They voted against me too often,” Trump told Time. “I gave them the position of a lifetime, and they vote against me often. They vote for me too.”
The president reserved special scorn for what he described as Democratic unity on the bench, naming former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden as recipients of judicial loyalty he feels he was denied.
“The Democrats stick like glue — those three, they virtually never vary. You can come up with the worst thing in the world and they’ll vote as a group. And while I don’t like it, there’s something I admire about it: there’s loyalty. So they have loyalty to Barack Hussein Obama,” he said.
Trump continued: “They have loyalty to Biden, even though Biden doesn’t even know who the hell they are. He wouldn’t know. He doesn’t even know what the Supreme Court is. And me, I gave them the chance of a lifetime, and it’s unfortunate what they did.”
The president’s grievances centered on two major rulings from the past year. In February, Gorsuch and Barrett joined a majority to invalidate Trump’s new 10 percent baseline tariff for most countries, along with separate levies on China, Mexico and Canada tied to fentanyl enforcement. The decision entitled businesses to more than $100 billion in refunds.
Trump singled out the tariff ruling as particularly damaging. “I don’t want loyalty. I want good decisions. The tariff decision was disastrous for the country,” he told Time. “All they had to do was a little clause saying any money paid does not have to be paid back…would have saved $400 billion. They chose not to save that.”
The president also attacked a ruling on birthright citizenship, where Barrett voted with the majority to overturn his executive order seeking to deny citizenship to children of parents who are not citizens or permanent residents. Kavanaugh concurred in part and dissented in part on that decision.
“It’s unfortunate what they did—not to me, to our country. Birthright citizenship. It’s becoming a major industry now. People are making millions and millions of dollars, and we’re losing trillions of dollars,” Trump said. “It’s become a corrupt business, all because of the Supreme Court decision. That decision was for the babies of slaves. Look at where it was—look at where it was approved. It wasn’t for Chinese people, wealthy or unwealthy, coming, you know, pouring into our country.”
This was not the first time Trump had publicly turned on his nominees. On September 15, he wrote on social media that “these are not the people I interviewed” after the trio voted against his proposed rules for mail-in voting.
Yet the president’s private actions have not always matched his public fury. Despite his September social media blast, Trump allocated four of just 134 tickets to the September 24 US-China state dinner to Barrett, Kavanaugh and their spouses.
Trump nominated Gorsuch in 2017, Kavanaugh in 2018 and Barrett in 2020, giving conservatives a 6-3 advantage on the court that has delivered him victories on other fronts.
Trump is scheduled to appear at a rally in Glendale, Arizona on Friday.