Alito on Trump’s praise of him, criticism of fellow justices: ‘I put all of that out of my mind’

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said in a rare televised interview Sunday on Fox News that he tries not to pay too much attention to President Trump’s frequent praise of him — and recent criticism of some of his fellow justices on the bench.

“I put all of that out of my mind. I trust that my colleagues put all of that out of their minds,” Alito told “Fox News Sunday” host Shannon Bream when asked about the president’s recent comments.

“But 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. I’m concerned about the long-term effect of that on the standing of the court,” he added. “And, of course, if the court does not ultimately retain a degree of trust among the American people, that will be very deleterious.”

The associate justice’s remarks come after Trump said in a Time magazine interview that he regrets nominating conservative Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

“What can I do? I put them in,” Trump said. “They voted against me too often.”

The president also railed against those justices — but not by name — after the high court blocked his mail voting plan . “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,” the president wrote on Truth Social last month.

But in that same social media post, Trump praised Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas as “legends,” noting their dissent against the ruling. The president earlier this year also commended Alito for writing the court’s landmark decision to limit a central provision of the Voting Rights Act.

Alito’s comments about public rhetoric aimed at justices more broadly follow two of his fellow jurists, Barrett and Justice Elena Kagan, telling lawmakers in a July testimony that the court needs more money to defend against the persistent rise in threats targeting them and their families.

Alito told CBS News in another interview this week that he’d considered retiring from the Supreme Court at the end of its most recent term. He also said his vote to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 alongside the court’s other conservative justices took “ courage .” On Sunday, Alito told Fox News he “wasn’t surprised” at the backlash to the ruling.

“I anticipated that it would anger a great many people who believed and continue to believe strongly that there should be a constitutional right to abortion. So I understood that,” he said. “I didn’t anticipate the particulars, what that would — the forms that that reaction would take, the most extreme forms.”