Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said he was not happy about some remarks from President Donald Trump and his administration about the court, in a rare expression of disagreement with the executive branch.

“I personally am not pleased with that,” Alito said about the president’s rhetoric in an interview with The Associated Press published Tuesday. “Everybody in this country has the right to criticize what we do. The substance of their criticism can be quite harsh. If we deserve it, then that’s fine. But rhetoric is a different story.”

Alito’s interview with the AP is the latest in a series of them he has done as he promotes the release of his first book, “So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of The Constitution, The Court, and Our Country.”

His comments mark the first time he has reacted publicly to the president’s attacks on the court. Several of Alito’s colleagues on the bench have spoken openly about the threats and harassment they have faced in an increasingly polarized political environment.

Some of the fiercest criticism of the justices has come from Trump. In a recent Time interview, the president singled out the three justices he nominated — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — and suggested they were not sufficiently loyal to him because they ruled against some of his key policies. That echoed a lengthy social media post in which he called them “a shell of their original selves” and predicted that the court “will go down as having rendered some of the most destructive, hurtful, and damaging decisions in our Country’s history,” even though it has signed off on any number of rulings in Trump’s favor.

“I gave them the position of a lifetime, and they vote against me often,” Trump told Time.

In contrast, Trump has frequently praised Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, whose votes are reliably in favor of the president and his administration. But Alito rejected accusastions that his decisions are aligned with Trump’s MAGA movement.

“It’s offensive,” Alito told the AP. “I honestly try to decide every single case on the merits, every single application on the merit. And that’s true whether the president is Donald Trump or Joe Biden or Barack Obama or anybody else.”

At 76, Alito is the second-oldest justice on the Supreme Court, after Thomas, who is 78. Neither has indicated that they intend to step down soon, despite speculation. Alito, in fact, told Bloomberg last week that he will stay on the court through the upcoming term, which ends in June.

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