Donald Trump’s relentless attacks on Supreme Court justices are starting to freak out even the Trumpiest member of the nation’s top court.
Justice Samuel Alito, 76, told Fox News on Sunday that he mostly ignores Trump when the 80-year-old president lavishes him with praise and attacks other members of the court. “I put all that out of my mind,” he said. “I trust that my colleagues put all of that out of their minds.”
But it appears even Alito is starting to worry about the impact of Trump’s habit of going after top judges when they rule against his administration’s agenda.
“I am concerned about the escalation in public rhetoric in general and about the things that people in important positions say about the Supreme Court as a whole and about individual justices,” he said. “I’m concerned about the long-term effect of that on the standing of the court.”
A hardline conservative, Alito himself sparked concerns about the standing of the nation’s most powerful court after an upside-down flag flew outside his Virginia home in January 2021, shortly after the Capitol riot. The symbol has been embraced by supporters of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
An “Appeal to Heaven” flag later appeared at the judge’s New Jersey vacation home. The banner had also been carried by some Jan. 6 rioters and adopted by parts of the Christian nationalist movement.
Alito, who blamed both displays on his wife, rejected later calls to recuse himself from ruling on cases related to Trump and the Jan. 6 attack. He also joined the court’s conservative majority in ruling that former presidents have sweeping immunity from prosecution for official acts.
Those and other controversies have earned him fawning praise from Trump as one of the president’s favorite SCOTUS justices. Trump called Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas “legends” last month, in a Truth Social post where he also went after other conservatives on the bench, including his own nominees Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch.
“These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves, a Court that is costing the United States Trillions of Dollars with shockingly bad rulings that are of such magnitude that it won’t be easily possible for our Country to recover or heal,” Trump wrote in the same post.
He repeated those attacks in an interview with Time last week. “What can I do? I put them in,” the president told the magazine. “They voted against me too often.”
Gorsuch and Barrett provoked Trump’s anger in February after joining a 6-3 decision that struck down his sweeping emergency tariff measures. Barrett also helped shoot down his attempt to restrict birthright citizenship in June.
She, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh have all been back in his crosshairs since last month after refusing to let his proposed mail-voting restrictions take effect before the midterms.
Trump’s attacks on his own nominees also come as concerns grow for the safety and security of SCOTUS justices amid a climate of growing political violence across the country, with Barrett and liberal justice Elena Kagan asking Congress for a further $14.6 million to protect the nation’s top judges in July.
Kagan told congressional appropriators then that court police expected threats to have jumped 38 percent this year after a 25 percent rise in 2025, while Barrett described a swatting incident at her home and the precautions her family has now found themselves forced to take.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
