Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has rejected claims that his rulings suggest he supports Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.
In a rare interview with the Associated Press to promote his new book, the justice, who was nominated to the bench by former President George W. Bush, said it was “offensive” to suggest Trump influences his decisions.
“I honestly try to decide every single case on the merits, every single application on the merits. And that’s true whether the president is Donald Trump or Joe Biden or Barack Obama or anybody else,” Alito said.
Alito is not one of the three conservative justices on the nation’s highest court whom Trump nominated. However, he has frequently voted in favor of the president or his administration, including on some of the president’s flagship policies.
In July, an analysis from The Wall Street Journal found that Alito’s votes aligned with Trump 89 percent of the time in 100 cases involving major policies of the president across both of his terms.
He also faced intense scrutiny after it was revealed that an upside-down flag associated with the 2020 election “Stop the Steal” movement was seen outside Alito’s Virginia home just days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters.
Alito blamed his wife for raising the inverted flag during a dispute with their neighbors over an anti-Trump lawn sign. He claimed he was unaware of the flag’s ties to the false claims that the 2020 election was rigged against Trump because of widespread voter fraud.
Alito also wrote the decision announcing that the Supreme Court had overturned the historic Roe v. Wade ruling that enshrined abortion as a nationwide right—a move that Trump took credit for after filling the bench with his picks.
In August, Trump praised Alito as “one of the Greatest of All Time” after confirming that he does not intend to retire from the bench.
The fawning comments arrived as Trump continues to attack the justices he nominated to the court—Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh—for voting against his signature policies, such as his sweeping tariff plans and efforts to end birthright citizenship.
“What can I do? 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,” Trump told Time magazine when asked if he regrets nominating the trio.
Elsewhere in his AP interview promoting his book, So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court and Our Country, Alito spoke out against the constant attacks Trump has fired off at the Supreme Court.
While Alito said such attacks do not influence how the justices make their decisions, he said they risk damaging public opinion of the court.
“The terms used by presidents and by members of their administration, Cabinet officers, other high-ranking officers in describing the Supreme Court and their decisions, and sometimes individual justices, is far different from what we saw 15 years ago,” Alito said.
Alito also responded to criticism from liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has said the Supreme Court risks damaging its reputation through its reliance on the emergency docket—where rulings are made quickly, often without oral arguments and with little or no explanation—to rule on appeals from the Trump administration.
“Unless something changes there, and I don’t foresee it right now, I’m afraid this is going to continue,” he said. “An application is something that I think we have to rule on.”
