Updated October 1, 2026, 6:56 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said he regrets nominating each of the three Supreme Court justices he appointed during his first term, criticizing Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett for speaking out against the Trump administration after choosing them to serve on the bench.
Trump expressed disappointment with his three hand-picked conservative justices in an interview with Time magazine published Oct. 1, following a string of Supreme Court defeats this year for the president over his tariff policies, his efforts to eliminate the birthright and his efforts to restrict mail-in voting.
“Yeah. Yeah, what can I do?” Trump responded when asked if he regretted nominating them. “I nominated them. They voted against me too many times. I was very… I gave them the job of their lives, and they vote against me often.”
Trump added that he admires how the three justices who make up the liberal bloc on the court — referring to Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — “stick together like glue” and “vote as a group.”
“They are loyal to Barack Hussein Obama,” Trump said. “They’re loyal to Biden, even though Biden doesn’t even know who they are. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t even know what the Supreme Court is. And I gave them the chance of a lifetime, and it’s unfortunate what they did.”
Asked if he wanted loyalty from his judges, Trump replied: “I like loyalty, yes.”
Pressed again, Trump said: “No, I don’t want loyalty. I want good decisions. The tariff decision was disastrous for the country. I want good decisions for the country.”
Trump’s most recent setback at the nation’s high court came on Sept. 14, when the court, in a 7-2 decision, blocked the president’s plan to use the U.S. Postal Service to restrict mail-in voting. The two dissenters were Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, with Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett each siding against the Trump administration.
Trump criticized his three Supreme Court picks shortly after the decision.
“These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social article. “They are a shell of their former selves, a court that is costing the United States billions of dollars with shockingly bad decisions of such magnitude that it will not be easy for our country to recover or heal.”
In June, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 against his efforts to undo the long-standing principle that all people born in the United States are American citizens, commonly known as birthright citizenship. Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch each disagreed.
In another 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court in February struck down Trump’s use of presidential emergency powers to impose drastic tariffs on imports, taking away one of the president’s main tools to carry out his aggressive trade policies. Alito, Thomas and Kavanaugh dissented.
Despite these losses, Trump won several other cases before the Supreme Court, including recognizing the presidential authority to fire executives of agencies, allowing the end of deportation protections for Haitians and Syrians, and allowing states to ban transgender women and girls from competing on women’s sports teams.
And during his first term in the White House, all three of Trump’s 2022 Supreme Court picks came out in favor of overturning the constitutional right to abortion under Roe v. Wade, helping conservatives achieve the victory they had sought for decades.
It is not yet clear whether Trump will have the opportunity to appoint a fourth justice to the Supreme Court. Alito said in August that he planned to remain on the bench at least until the next session, denying speculation that the conservative justice might resign to allow Trump to choose his replacement.
Contact Joey Garrison on X @joeygarrison.
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