Trump says Supreme Court justices 'get weak' in lambasting unfavorable coverage

President Trump on Friday lamented that Supreme Court Justices “can’t really fight back” and “get weak” in the face of unfavorable media coverage as he railed against what he framed as "horrible" treatment toward the nation's highest court.

“What the lawyers do is, they're doing it to the Supreme Court Justices, hoping that they'll be overcome by the horrible things they say about them,” Trump said in remarks at the Department of Justice (DOJ), in which the president took a victory lap after his first few weeks in office. “They say things about Supreme Court justices and judges that are just horrible. They’re playing the ref.”

He called out Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, as well as Chief Justice John Roberts, as he argued that those justices get “treated unbelievably badly” in the hopes that “they can sway them to go along.”

“They're humans, and they don't want to be accused of many, many things, including gross incompetence,” Trump said of the justices. “They don't like it, they don't want it, there's not much they can do about it. They're in a position - they can't really fight back, really, very well. And so what they do is sometimes they get weak. I would say a majority, maybe, of the times.”

He said that weakness was why he was “so impressed” with Judge Aileen Cannon, who ruled in favor of Trump during the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case -- though he's largely attacked other judges who have presided over his various legal battles in recent years and ruled against him.

"It's very sad what they do to the Supreme Court and all of a lot of the judges that I had, if you look at it, they take tremendous abuse in the New York Times and The Washington Post, all of the different networks. They take such abuse. And honestly, they're very simply, they're afraid of bad publicity. They don't want bad publicity. And it's truly interference, in my opinion, and it should be illegal, and it probably is illegal in some form," Trump said.

"It's a campaign, and it's by the same scum that you have been dealing with for years," Trump said, namedropping former DOJ special counsel Jack Smith, former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman and Norm Eisen, an attorney for Democrats in Trump’s first impeachment. Trump along the 2024 campaign trail had railed against the prosecutions he faced, including two that were led by the DOJ.

Trump has also long clashed with the press and taken issue with coverage, but he doubled down on Friday with a suggestion that "these networks and these newspapers are really no different than a highly paid political operative."

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