Trump Criticizes Supreme Court Justices for Not Showing Allegiance After Tariff Ruling

About a decade ago, I moved into an apartment in Washington, D.C., that seemed like a bargain. The unit was in good shape and in a nice location. The price was reasonable—slightly below market rate, but not suspiciously low for a fourth-floor walkup. I did a brief walkthrough before signing the lease, just in case, only to cut it short when my editor at the time called to let me know that the Brexit vote was looking closer than expected.

Only after I moved in and tried to fall asleep on the first night did I realize why I was able to rent the place so easily: It was a few blocks down the street from a fire station, and the trucks passed under my window whenever they responded to a call. It took me about a month—a painful, exhausting, bleary-eyed month—to get used to it. Now I can sleep through almost anything.

I think about that fire station whenever I stumble across one of President Donald Trump’s social-media posts during his second term. Gone are the days when his 140-character remarks on Twitter would shape the news cycle in the late 2010s. Now it is easier to tune out the long jeremiads that he cranks out on Truth Social, which also might be the least readable social-media website in Internet history.

Trump’s social-media rants these days are so frequent and so voluminous that it is rarely worth paying them any specific attention to them. But his Mother’s Day post about the Supreme Court is a notable exception. The president gave a surprisingly frank assessment of his view of the Supreme Court—and how he expects personal loyalty from the justices that he appoints to it.

Trump’s Criticism of Gorsuch and Barrett

In the lengthy post, Trump criticized two members of the high court for voting in Trump v. Learning Resources, the case that nixed his purported ability to impose hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs under a Cold War-era emergency-powers law. The Supreme Court held 6-3 that Trump had exceeded the powers laid out in the statute.

“I ‘Love’ Justice Neil Gorsuch! He’s a really smart and good man, but he voted against me, and our Country, on Tariffs, a devastating move,” Trump wrote. “How do I reconcile this? So bad, and hurtful to our Country. I have, likewise, always liked and respected Amy Coney Barrett, but the same thing with her. They were appointed by me, and yet have hurt our Country so badly!”

It would be hard to find a better example than this of Trump’s thinking that the justices that he nominated to the high court should be personally loyal to him. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, his third appointee to date, was among the dissenters. There were six justices in the Learning Resources majority; four of them did not warrant a mention here. Trump did not even bother to criticize Chief Justice John Roberts, who actually wrote the opinion.

Naturally, that partial silence was not out of respect for the court. Trump obviously does not hold the three liberal justices in high regard, as evidenced by his omission of any criticism toward them in the post.