President Donald Trump said he regrets nominating all three of the Supreme Court justices he appointed during his first term, according to an interview published Thursday.
The president told TIME that Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, the three he placed on the high court between 2017 and 2020, have voted against him too often since taking the bench.
Asked whether he regretted the nominations, Trump pointed to the appointments he had handed each justice.
“Yeah. Yeah. What can I do? I put them in,” Trump said. “They voted against me too often. I was very—I gave them the position of a lifetime, and they vote against me often. They vote for me too.”
The president tied his frustration to the court’s rulings on birthright citizenship and his emergency tariffs.
“It’s unfortunate what they did—not to me, to our country,” Trump said of the citizenship ruling. “And it’s become a corrupt business, all because of the Supreme Court decision.”
The court in June found Trump’s order restricting birthright citizenship unlawful, with Barrett and Kavanaugh in the majority and Gorsuch dissenting.
The president also faulted the justices over a February ruling that struck down his global tariffs, arguing a single clause could have spared the government a major payout.
“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,” Trump said. “They chose not to save that.”
Trump praised the court’s Democratic appointees for voting as a bloc, saying he admired their loyalty, before the interviewer asked whether loyalty was what he wanted from his own picks.
“I do like loyalty, yeah,” Trump said. Pressed on the point, he added: “No, I don’t want loyalty. I want good decisions.”
The remarks come weeks after Trump criticized the same justices over a September ruling that declined to let a Postal Service directive restrict mail-in ballots ahead of the midterms, a decision he called “another bad decision” from a court he said had been “bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left.”
“These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at the time.
