WASHINGTON, Oct 1 (Reuters) – US President Donald Trump said he regretted nominating three Supreme Court justices — Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh — who have opposed him in recent rulings, according to a Time Magazine interview.
The Republican president was asked about his recent comments regarding the three conservative justices in the interview, which was conducted on Monday.
“Do you regret nominating them?” the interviewer asked, referring to Trump’s comments in a recent Truth Social post.
“Yeah. Yeah,” Trump responded, according to a transcript of the interview.
“What can I do? I put them in. They voted against me too often. I was very — I gave them the position of a lifetime, and they vote against me often.”
Trump appointed Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett during his first term as president, building a 6-3 conservative majority and allowing the court to steer a dramatic rightward course since 2020.
“I do like loyalty, yeah,” Trump told the interviewer, who then asked whether that was what he wanted from the justices.
“No, I don’t want loyalty. I want good decisions,” Trump said.
After the top US judicial body declined to allow a Postal Service rule restricting the use of mail-in ballots in the November midterm elections, Trump said his appointees were behaving differently than they had during interviews.
“These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves,” he wrote on Truth Social.
After the court in February struck down his sweeping global tariffs that it found he had imposed illegally using a law meant for national emergencies, Trump reserved special ire for Gorsuch and Barrett, who were in the majority in that 6-3 ruling.
(Reporting by Katharine Jackson and Doina Chiacu, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
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