President Trump looked a magazine interviewer in the eye and said the quiet part out loud. He regrets Neil Gorsuch. He regrets Brett Kavanaugh. He regrets Amy Coney Barrett. All three. The men and the woman who gave him a 6-3 Court, ended Roe, and recognized presidential immunity for official acts are, in his telling this week, a bad hire.
Breitbart reported the exchange from a TIME interview published October 1. Asked flat whether he regretted the nominations, Trump did not dodge.
Yeah. Yeah. What can I do? I put them in. They voted against me too often. I was very — I gave them the position of a lifetime, and they vote against me often. They vote for me too.
Then he looked across the bench at Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson and found something to admire. The New York Post has the line. Democrats, he said, “stick like glue.” You can hand them “the worst thing in the world and they’ll vote as a group.” He called that loyalty. Loyalty to Barack Hussein Obama. Loyalty to Biden, “even though Biden doesn’t even know who the hell they are.”
A beat later he walked it back. “No, I don’t want loyalty. I want good decisions.” Both sentences are in the transcript. Believe the second one. The first one is what he actually feels.
Three losses that actually cost something
The anger is not imaginary. It is attached to three cases that did real damage.
In February the Court ruled 6-3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not hand a president a blank check to impose global tariffs. Gorsuch and Barrett joined the majority. Kavanaugh dissented. Trump told TIME the tariff decision was disastrous for the country, and that a short clause saying money already collected did not have to be paid back “would have saved $400 billion.”
They chose not to write it. The Post put the refund exposure to businesses at more than $100 billion. Either number is a wound.
In June the Court struck down his order limiting birthright citizenship for children born here to parents who are not citizens or permanent residents. Barrett was with the majority that killed the order. Kavanaugh split the difference, concurring in part and dissenting in part. Trump did not treat it as a personal slight. He called it a loss for the country, and he was right about the industry that grew up around the clause.
Birthright citizenship. It’s becoming a major industry now. People are making millions and millions of dollars, and we’re losing trillions of dollars. And it’s become a corrupt business, all because of the Supreme Court decision. That decision was for the babies of slaves. It wasn’t for Chinese people, wealthy or unwealthy, coming, you know, pouring into our country.
Then September. The Court refused to let a Postal Service rule on mail ballots take effect before the midterms. Alito and Thomas wanted the stay. Kavanaugh wrote that the government had a fair prospect on the statute and still called the 2026 rollout arbitrary.
Trump went to Truth Social around September 15 and said the three were “merely a shell of their original selves,” a Court costing the country trillions with rulings “of such magnitude that it won’t be easily possible for our Country to recover or heal.” RedState noted that the TIME question was built on that post.
Mail-in ballots. Birth tourism dressed up as a constitutional right. A tariff statute read so tightly that collected duties may have to be mailed back. A president who campaigned on all three has a right to be furious at the outcomes.
Loyalty is the wrong word
Fury at the outcomes is not the same thing as a claim on the judges. Scripture already settled that argument. “Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great; ye shall not be afraid of the face of man; for the judgment is God’s.”
A justice who trims a case because the man who nominated him is watching has already failed the office.
The liberal trio does not vote together because they owe Obama a favor. They vote together because they share a theory of the Constitution in which the text is a suggestion and the policy goal is the law. That is not loyalty. That is a faction. Admiring the glue is like admiring a crew that always votes to sink the ship. They are reliable. They are reliably wrong.
Trump’s own clarification is the better standard. Good decisions, not retention bonuses. On the tariffs, a justice can believe IEEPA was written for sanctions and emergencies, not for a permanent global tariff schedule, and still think Congress should have fixed the refund mess in a statute.
On birthright, the original public meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment was about the children of slaves and of people subject to the full jurisdiction of the United States, not a reward for illegal entry. Getting that case wrong is not independence. It is a misreading with a price tag. On mail ballots, declining to disturb an election calendar is a habit this Court has, and it keeps handing the same broken system another cycle.
Matt Margolis at PJ Media is right that a president who tallies the Court like a whip count will always end up disappointed. George W. Bush got John Roberts and watched him save Obamacare. Dwight Eisenhower got Earl Warren. The difference is what these three already did. All three were in the majority in Dobbs, which returned abortion to the states and buried Roe.
They were in the majority in Trump v. United States, which recognized immunity for official acts and kept the lawfare machine from treating every presidential decision as a crime. Those are not shells. Those are the reasons the seats were worth the confirmations, the Kavanaugh circus included.
Life tenure is the design. A president nominates. The Senate consents. After that the commission outlasts the man who signed it. Trump cannot fire them, and he knows it. “What can I do? I put them in.” That shrug is more constitutional than the loyalty talk that came before it.
He has not even been consistent about the grudge. The Post reported that hard feelings did not stop him from handing four of 134 tickets to the September 24 state dinner with China to Barrett, Kavanaugh, and their spouses. You can call someone a shell of the person you interviewed and still want them at the table when Beijing is in the room.
Regret the bad opinions. Fight the next case. Ask the next nominee, in public, what “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” meant in 1868, and what a statute has to say before a president may tax the world. Do not ask for a vote. The country does not need another bloc. It needs a Court that can read.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
