The Check

(audio playback is not AI; it may not even be I.)

The man at the corner table has been having a big time. He’s ordered the Chateaubriand for two. Twice. Three bottles of wine. Oysters. Finally, after four hours, he is finished. But then the waiter brings the check and the man erupts. How dare they. Doesn’t this restaurant know who he is? He bestowed his custom on this establishment. The meal should be free. The wine should be free. The restaurant should be thanking him for choosing to spend his time there.

Now let me introduce you to something more absurd.

On Sunday night, Mother’s Day, the president picked up his phone. Nobody asked him a gotcha question. No crisis forced his hand. He hauled off with a 545-word attack on Truth Social about the two Supreme Court justices he nominated to the bench.

Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett voted with the majority in February to strike down his tariff policy. ¹

He is convinced they will rule against him again on birthright citizenship. He is livid:²

“…people that I appointed have shown so little respect to our Country, and its people. What is the reason for this? They have to do the right thing, but it’s really OK for them to be loyal to the person that appointed them to ‘almost’ the highest position in the land, that is, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court.”

This isn’t an isolated outburst. After the February tariff ruling, Trump called Gorsuch and Barrett a “disgrace,” “disloyal,” “unpatriotic,” “fools and lapdogs,” and “an embarrassment to their families.” Sunday was the moderated version.

The president of the United States declares that Supreme Court justices should be loyal to the president who appointed them. The president, who swore to protect the Constitution, would like the justices not to do their duty by the same Constitution they swore to.

“I don’t want loyalty, but I do want and expect it for our Country,” he wrote. That is a version of “I’m not a racist, but…” The disclaimer exists to be overridden by everything that follows. By the end of the president’s post, “loyalty to the Country” has become indistinguishable from loyalty to Trump’s policy preferences. The tell is that he never identifies a principle the justices should be loyal to — not originalism, not textualism, not judicial restraint. The only metric is whether they ruled his way.

President Trump reinforces this when he talks about Democrats. He praises their justices for staying “true to the people that honored them” and never wavering “no matter how good or bad a case may be.” He’s explicitly lauding justices for ruling on the basis of political allegiance rather than legal merit, and wishing his appointees would do the same. This isn’t subtext. It’s text.

The Founders designed life tenure to insulate judges from exactly this kind of pressure. Justice Gorsuch has addressed this: “My loyalty is to the Constitution, the laws of the United States. That’s the oath I took. It’s really just that simple.”

Gorsuch’s answer is the conservative answer — it’s the Federalist Society’s whole theory of the judiciary, the one Trump’s own judicial selection apparatus was built on. The post doesn’t just attack two justices. It repudiates the principle that produced them.

1. President Trump calls the tariff ruling a “close decision.” A 6-3 decision is not close. Two-thirds of the Court agreed. Describing it as narrow reframes a supermajority rebuke as a coin flip, making the dissent seem nearly victorious rather than decisively outnumbered.

2. Trump claims the tariff ruling cost the United States $159 billion in refunds. Worth noting: that money was collected from American importers under a tariff regime the Court found unconstitutional. Returning it isn’t a gift to “enemies” or “countries” as he claims— it’s restitution to Americans and American companies for unlawfully collected funds. He frames the refund as a loss when it’s actually the correction of one.