by WorldTribune Staff, October 1, 2026 Non-AI Real World News
During an interview with Time Magazine, President Donald Trump was asked about comments he made about Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh not being the people he interviewed. “You said they were like shells of their former selves,” the reporter asked. “Do you regret nominating them?”
‘What can I do?I put them in.’ Dan Winters for TIME
“What can I do?” the president said. “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. They vote for me too.”
Trump has broken with and publicly denounced the establishment-favoring Federalist Society and its longtime leader Leonard Leo who nominated the justices in the 2016 campaign.
Trump has more than once denounced “sleazebag” Leo in what one analyst called “a shocking rupture between America’s preeminent conservative legal group and the Republican president.”
“One of the signal achievements of Trump’s first term, in the eyes of conservatives, was how he appointed scores of conservative judges — at the district, circuit, and Supreme Court tiers — at an unprecedented pace, securing their confirmations to the federal bench with lifetime appointments,” A.R. Hoffman wrote for The New York Sun on May 30. He added:
“Leo, the chairman of the Federalist Society’s board of directors and its former vice president, is by many measures the nation’s most powerful conservative legal activist,” Hoffman noted. “He is widely credited with a role in placing Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Chief Justice Roberts on the Supreme Court.”
The Federalist Society has a presence at more than 200 law schools and counts some 70,000 members. The Harvard Crimson reported that it remains as a key presence for conservatives.
Related: Trump denounces Federalist Society founder, regrets taking advice on judges, June 1, 2025
As for the Left’s justices, their rulings “virtually never vary,” Trump told Time:
“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. So they have loyalty to Barack Hussein Obama. They have loyalty to Biden, even though Biden doesn’t even know who the hell they are. He wouldn’t know. He doesn’t even know what the Supreme Court is. And me, I gave them the chance of a lifetime, and it’s unfortunate what they did.”
Trump’s criticism continued:
“It’s unfortunate what they did — not to me, to our country. Birthright citizenship. It’s becoming a major industry now. People are making millions and millions of dollars, and we’re losing trillions of dollars. And it’s become a corrupt business, all because of the Supreme Court decision.”
The three justices ruled against key parts of Trump’s agenda this year. In February, the Supreme Court held 6-3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the president to impose tariffs.
Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett joined those voting against the tariffs.
In June, the court struck down Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to parents who are in the country illegally or on temporary visas.
