On Sunday evening, Donald Trump posted one of the more remarkable sentences any sitting president has written about the Supreme Court.
“In fact, I should be the one wanting to PACK THE COURT!“
Read that again. The 47th president of the United States, a Republican, wrote that he should be the one wanting to pack the Supreme Court. He wrote it on Truth Social. He capitalized PACK THE COURT. He put the old Democratic heresy into his own mouth and dared Republicans to notice.
( @realDonaldTrump – Truth Social Post )
( Donald J. Trump – May 10 2026, 6:34 PM ET )I “Love” Justice Neil Gorsuch! He’s a really smart and good man, but he voted against me, and our Country, on Tariffs, a devastating move. How do I reconcile this? So bad, and hurtful to our… pic.twitter.com/aMYkpx7BhN
— Fan Donald J. Trump 🇺🇸 TRUTH POSTS (@TruthTrumpPosts) May 10, 2026
Republicans Used To Call This Vandalism
When Democrats floated expanding the Supreme Court in 2020 and 2021, Republicans did not take it quietly. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell called Democratic pressure on the court “hostage-taking” and said, “Responsible people across the political spectrum have a duty to denounce this.” He warned that Democrats wanted a sword dangling over the justices whenever they weighed the facts of a case. Republicans later introduced constitutional amendments to keep the court at nine seats.
That was when Democrats were talking about court expansion. When Trump talks about it, it becomes a Sunday evening Truth Social post.
Trump Turned on His Own Justices
He named them. “Maybe Neil and Amy just had a really bad day,” Trump wrote, referring to Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, two of his three Supreme Court picks. He also mentioned Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Biden appointee, which tells you the vote alignment. This was not liberal justices outsmarting conservatives. Two Trump appointees joined a 6-3 decision against him, and Trump responded by saying he should be the one wanting to pack the court.
Trump appointed three of the nine current justices. He ran on that record. Republicans celebrated it. Now, because two of those justices did not deliver the outcome he wanted, he is flirting with the same idea Republicans spent years calling an institutional threat.
The Loyalty Demand
The most revealing line in the post was not the court-packing line. It was this:
“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.”
A sitting president is telling Supreme Court justices that loyalty to him is not just acceptable. It is expected. He put “almost” in quotation marks. The implication is hard to miss: the highest position is his, and the court sits below it.
Supreme Court justices have lifetime appointments, so they cannot be pressured by the president who nominated them. That independence is not a flaw. It is the system. Trump’s post did not just criticize a ruling. It described a court where justices owe something to the president who gave them their seats.
McConnell called Democratic pressure on the court “hostage-taking.” He did not sound the same alarm Sunday night.
The Rulings That Set Him Off
Trump’s post grew out of two Supreme Court fights: one already lost, one still looming.
The first was the tariff ruling. In February, the Supreme Court held 6-3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act did not authorize Trump’s sweeping tariff program. The decision opened the door to refunds for importers who paid the invalidated tariffs. Trump described that money as going back to “enemies, and people, companies, and Countries, that have been ripping us off for years.” Customs officials have said the first refunds could begin as early as May 12, and AP reported that more than 330,000 importers paid about $166 billion in IEEPA tariffs.
The second fight is birthright citizenship. Lower courts have blocked Trump’s order attempting to narrow automatic citizenship for children born on American soil, while the Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the merits. Trump, in the same post, warned that a loss there would be catastrophic.
On both issues, Trump did not make a careful constitutional argument. He argued that the justices he appointed should have found a way to rule in his favor. “Sometimes decisions have to be allowed to use Good, Strong, Common Sense as a guide,” he wrote.
In law, that is outcome shopping with better branding. Courts are not supposed to do it. Trump wants them to, and said so plainly.
The Silence Is the Story Now
When Democrats proposed adding four seats to the court in 2021, Biden’s bipartisan commission studied court expansion and did not recommend it. The idea went nowhere in Congress. Republicans declared victory over a dangerous assault on judicial independence.
Trump posted Sunday night that he should be the one wanting to pack the court.
The party that spent years warning against court packing now has a simpler problem.
The man saying it out loud is theirs.