The New York Times reports that Trump has criticized the three Supreme Court Justices who joined four other of their colleagues in rejecting Trump’s efforts to change mail-in balloting.
The only Justices who dissented were Alito and Thomas because of course they did. While Alito and Thomas have made a little effort to hide their, shall we say, questionable practices concerning the receipt of gifts, they have made no effort to hide their openly political “judicial” decisionmaking.
A little aside: With regard to Justice Alito’s receipt of gifts, The Warning With Steve Schmidt has a great podcast episode with ProPublica’s Justin Elliott about ProPublica’s reporting on Justice Alito’s relationship with GOP billionaires. The episode also discusses Justice Thomas’s previous alleged conflicts of interest. The Schmidt interview was prompted by ProPublica‘s publication of a great, and scary, expose on Justice Alito. (I should explain my hedging in describing the Alito and Thomas stuff: I am an attorney and a member of the Supreme Court bar. As such, and notwithstanding the First Amendment, I am subject to discipline if I step over some blurry lines in criticizing judges, especially if the criticism impugns the integrity (or lack thereof) of the target of the criticism. I could probably say whatever I want about Justices Alito and Thomas, but I don’t feel like testing that in a blog that very few people even read, although I have to admit, getting disbarred for something I write here would almost certainly generate lots more traffic, and so it is tempting.)
Turning back to the Orange Autocrat (who has no integrity that I could possibly impugn), the Supreme Court rejected his mail-in ballot gambit by a 7-2 vote. Did I mention that already? 7 to 2. Wow. Since Alito and Thomas were gimme’s, that’s really 7-zip. You got crushed, Donaldo. Oops, that was another digression.
Anyway, Trump lit into the three Justices whom he appointed for voting against his attempt to fix the midterms. He (or Ms. Harp) wrote on social media, “These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court.”
In the stunningly stupid way that Trump has of often disclosing the shady stuff, his criticism of the three Justices suggests that he thought he had some understandings–some side deals–with the three Justices. What promises did he exact from them?
Clearly, he has gotten something out of his nominees. Just look at the Presidential immunity decision the Court handed down in 2024, which seems, in Trump’s mind at least, to have given him free rein to cash in on the presidency (which Trump and his family certainly have). But maybe he thought that they would essentially give him anything he wanted. This they haven’t done.
Did the then-future Supreme Court Justices make promises that they haven’t kept (entirely)? Or was Trump just too stupid to understand what they were telling him? I would have to guess that Trump thought it appropriate to exact some promises in return for Supreme Court nominations, but he didn’t understand the commitments (if any) that the future Justices just were and weren’t willing to make. He thought he had “deal,” but didn’t understand the terms of the deal.
On this interpretation, Trump is so dumb that the future Justices didn’t even have to “play” him, or even think they were “playing” him. His stupidity–and cupidity–blinded him to whatever they were saying, including to the limits of what they’d give him. Limits, by the way, that don’t seem to exist for the bitter old guys, Alito and Thomas.
After all, Trump is a man who thinks he’s brilliant but is actually an idiot. In Trump’s addled mind, what he wants to be true is reality, and what he doesn’t want to be true simply can’t be real. Throw in the way his greed also shapes what he wants to be true–something we see in his reaction to criticisms of data centers and AI–and you get a total distortion of reality in the service of stupidity and cupidity. (A nice phrase, so I thought I’d repeat it.)
At some point, reality always wins, however. Unfortunately, we may be the collateral damage when reality catches up to Trump.
As for what was promised in the interviews that Trump conducted with the future Justices, we may find out once Trump is out of office and gone, but it would be nice if we didn’t have to wait for that.