President Donald Trump says he regrets nominating all three Supreme Court justices he selected during his first term, arguing that they have ruled against him too often since joining the nation’s highest court.
Trump made the comments during an interview with TIME published Thursday.
The president was specifically asked about Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, all of whom Trump nominated between 2017 and 2020.
When asked whether he regretted those appointments, Trump did not hesitate.
“Yeah. Yeah. What can I do? I put them in,” Trump said.
He then explained his frustration with their voting records.
“They voted against me too often,” Trump said.
The president noted that he had given each justice what he described as “the position of a lifetime,” only to later watch them side against his administration in major cases.
“They vote against me often,” Trump said, before acknowledging, “They vote for me too.”
Trump specifically pointed to Supreme Court decisions involving birthright citizenship and his administration’s emergency tariff policies.
The president expressed particular frustration over the court’s handling of his attempt to restrict birthright citizenship.
“It’s unfortunate what they did — not to me, to our country,” Trump said.
He argued that the decision had created broader problems and described the situation as having become “a corrupt business.”
The Supreme Court ruled on the administration’s birthright-citizenship policy in June, with Barrett siding with the majority and Gorsuch dissenting. Kavanaugh agreed with the judgment in part while writing separately.
Trump also criticized the court over a February decision involving his global tariffs.
According to Trump, the justices could have included language preventing the government from having to return money already collected under the tariff policy.
“All they had to do was a little clause saying any money paid does not have to be paid back,” Trump said.
The president claimed such language “would have saved $400 billion.”
“They chose not to save that,” he added.
Trump also discussed what he sees as the greater ideological unity among the Supreme Court’s Democratic-appointed justices.
He praised their tendency to vote together and said he admired their loyalty.
That prompted the interviewer to ask whether Trump wanted similar loyalty from the justices he nominated.
“I do like loyalty, yeah,” Trump responded.
When pressed further, however, the president clarified his position.
“No, I don’t want loyalty. I want good decisions,” Trump said.
The remarks mark one of Trump’s strongest public criticisms yet of all three of his Supreme Court appointees at the same time.
Gorsuch was Trump’s first Supreme Court selection, joining the court in 2017.
Kavanaugh followed in 2018.
Barrett became Trump’s third appointment shortly before the 2020 presidential election.
Together, the three appointments gave Trump an unusually significant influence over the makeup of the Supreme Court during his first administration, per Breitbart News.
But Trump has increasingly criticized the justices when they have ruled against his policies.
His latest comments follow another dispute with the court in September involving mail-in ballots.
After the justices declined to allow a Postal Service directive restricting certain mail-in ballots ahead of the midterm elections, Trump publicly criticized his own appointees.
“These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court,” Trump wrote at the time.
He went even further, describing them as “merely a shell of their original selves.”
Trump has nevertheless acknowledged that the three justices have also voted in ways favorable to his administration.
His complaint is that they have not done so consistently enough on several of the issues he considers especially important.
The president’s latest interview makes his position clear: despite personally selecting Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett for lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court, Trump now says he regrets all three choices.
