By The Epoch Times | Created at 2026-10-01 20:02:02 | Updated at 2026-10-01 21:12:52
1 hour ago
President Donald Trump in Washington on Oct. 1, 2026. Win McNamee/Getty Images
President Donald Trump said in a new interview that he regrets nominating Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
“They voted against me too often,” Trump told Time magazine in an interview published Oct. 1. “I was very—I gave them the position of a lifetime, and they vote against me often. They vote for me too.”
Trump nominated Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch to the nation’s top court in his first term to fill vacancies that arose. No Supreme Court vacancies have occurred so far in the president’s second term. Supreme Court justices serve for life, unless they step down.
Barrett, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and three other justices—Justices Samuel Alito, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas—were selected by Republican presidents, while the three remaining justices—Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor—were picked by Democratic presidents.
“The Democrats stick like glue—those three, they virtually never vary,” Trump said. “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.”
Trump said that Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor have loyalty to the presidents that picked them. He said that he does not want loyalty from the trio of justices he nominated, but he does want good decisions.
He said that bad decisions have included the Supreme Court striking down his executive order that excluded children of illegal immigrants and temporary visitors from birthright citizenship—Barrett and Kavanaugh were part of the majority—and the court ruling that some of his tariffs exceed an emergency powers law, a decision that saw Barrett and Gorsuch joining the majority. The justices chosen by Democrat presidents were part of the majority in each of those decisions.
“I put these people in,” Trump said. “It is what it is. Very disappointing, very disappointing for the country—their decisions. And the country knows it. Very disappointing for the country. The other ones—they stick like glue. It’s unbelievable, right?”
The new comments come about two weeks after Trump wrote on Truth Social, after the court rejected a new mail-in ballot rule, that “these are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves.”
The Supreme Court did not respond to a request for comment about that post, and it did not return an inquiry regarding Trump’s remarks to Time magazine.
