Donald Trump’s tantrum in February after the Supreme Court rejected his tariffs policy was extreme, even by his standards. The president not only condemned the six-member majority as “a disgrace to our nation,” but he also insisted that the justices who dared to rule in a way he didn’t like were “very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.”

Asked then whether he regretted nominating Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, Trump didn’t answer the question directly, though he said he considers their role in the ruling “an embarrassment to their families.”

In his latest Time magazine interview, the president was even more direct on the subject. From the article:

Yet with so much at stake — for the country and the world, for his party and his own power — Trump can seem curiously preoccupied. During a 75-minute Oval Office interview with TIME, he was discursive and grievance-fueled, veering from the crises of his presidency to resentments old and emerging. He said he regretted appointing Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, after they ruled against him on tariffs, mail ballots, and birthright citizenship. “I gave them the position of a lifetime,” he said, “and they voted against me often.”

The transcript of the interview added remarkable details. Asked specifically if he regretted nominating Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, Trump said he did — and then he kept going.

“The Democrats stick like glue — those three, they virtually never vary,” the president said, referring to Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “You can come up with the worst thing in the world and they’ll vote as a group. And while I don’t like it, there’s something I admire about it: There’s loyalty. So they have loyalty to Barack Hussein Obama. They have loyalty to Biden, even though Biden doesn’t even know who the hell they are. He wouldn’t know. He doesn’t even know what the Supreme Court is.”

The petty and unhinged whining didn’t stop there. After an additional harangue about the birthright citizenship and tariff rulings — which really weren’t close calls, and which legal experts of every ideological stripe expected him to lose — Time asked, “You mentioned the word loyalty a moment ago. Is that what you want from your Supreme Court picks?”

The president replied, “I do like loyalty, yeah.”

To be sure, the rhetoric was not altogether surprising. As recently as April, Trump declared by way of his social media platform that “certain” conservative justices on the court have “gone weak, stupid, and bad.” A month later, on Mother’s Day, Trump broke new ground, publishing a 544-word screed in which he said Gorsuch and Barrett “have hurt our Country so badly!” He added, “[I]t’s really OK for them to be loyal to the person that appointed them.”

The problem with these rants isn’t just the impropriety or errors of fact and judgment. Collectively, what they also offer is a reminder that Trump still doesn’t understand how the government works in the United States.

As he sees it, if his administration does something illegal, then it’s incumbent on Supreme Court justices he appointed to simply look the other way — out of “loyalty.”

Indeed, Trump seems utterly baffled by the idea that he could appoint Supreme Court justices who, in turn, sometimes evaluates cases on the merits, which is, the last time I checked, their literal job. In other words, the president keeps publicly complaining not about justices being corrupt, but about justices not being corrupt enough to make him happy.

It’s tempting to think Trump would keep these attitudes private, perhaps limiting his complaints to close allies behind closed doors, but he instead keeps sharing them publicly, as if it were normal for a president to make these ridiculous complaints.

It’s not.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

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