Trump Says Justices Are 'Not the People I Interviewed' After Supreme Court Mail Ballot Loss

President Donald Trump attacked Supreme Court justices on Tuesday after the court rejected his push to curb mail-in voting.

Responding to the Supreme Court mail ballot loss on Truth Social, Trump said the three justices he nominated were 'not the people I interviewed'.

Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett all sided with the ruling against Trump. The three sit within the court's conservative majority and were appointed by Trump, while Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas were the only members to dissent.

Trump described the Justices as 'a shell of their original selves'. He also claimed the Supreme Court had been 'bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years'.

Trump's Supreme Court Loss Creates an Awkward Conflict

Michael Wolff, a longtime Trump biographer, discussed the president's reaction during Tuesday's episode of Inside Trump's Head.

Wolff argued that Trump's response reflected his tendency to seek conflict and to treat allies as enemies when they oppose him. 'This is the thing that he always looks for. This is the conflict,' Wolff said. 'Today, the court is the enemy.'

That interpretation focuses on Trump's response rather than the legal substance of the mail-in voting case. Wolff said the president's outrage stemmed from the need to identify and attack an opponent, even when the people involved were his own nominees.

'There is no logic here. The logic is only the conflict,' Wolff said. 'Who is my enemy? Let me vilify my enemy.'

Trump Turns On Justices He Appointed

The result leaves Trump in an awkward political position, Wolff said. The president appointed Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, yet all three supported a ruling that went against the position he had urged the court to adopt.

'He's in an awkward position here. These are the people he appointed,' Wolff said. He described the justices as 'the Federalist Society people' who were selected for their conservative beliefs.

Wolff said Trump responded by developing an explanation for why those justices no longer resembled the candidates he believed he had chosen. Wolff argued that the president's claim that they were 'not the people I interviewed' served that purpose.

With those allies 'turning against him', Wolff said Trump's available move was to 'come up with a rationale for why they are not the people I appointed'. His criticism of the court therefore redirected attention from his own appointments towards his allegation that the left had influenced the justices.

Supreme Court Defeat Feeds Trump's Midterm Message

Wolff called the suggestion that the 'radical left' had swayed three conservative justices 'extraordinary'. He nevertheless said it was consistent with Trump's approach ahead of the midterm elections, when the president intends to present the left as his central political opponent.

'Repetition, repetition, repetition,' Wolff said, describing how Trump plans to keep that argument before his MAGA supporters.

Under Wolff's reading, the Supreme Court loss can be presented to Trump's political base as another conflict with the left, despite the participation of three justices Trump personally nominated. That does not resolve the tension surrounding the appointments, but it gives Trump a familiar enemy to blame.

Wolff offered a blunt judgement on that strategy. 'It's pathetic, of course. It's intellectually pathetic,' he said. 'But from his point of view, this is what he's bringing to the MAGA core.'