President Donald Trump lashed out at the Supreme Court on Wednesday, singling out Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as “that new, Low IQ person, that somehow found her way to the bench.” He also said the court’s three Democratic-appointed justices “stick together like glue” while the Republican-appointed justices “don’t stick together.”
Trump’s post on Truth Social came as the nine-justice panel was expected to issue a widely anticipated ruling on whether he can unilaterally deny citizenship to children born to parents without legal immigration status. It also followed a recent Supreme Court decision that struck down his use of a Carter-era emergency powers law to impose massive import taxes on goods from nearly every U.S. trading partner, a ruling Trump described as handing Democrats “a 159 Billion Dollar pile of cash.”
In the post, Trump said the court’s Republican justices had “gone weak, stupid, and bad,” and accused them of giving Democrats “win after win.” He tied that complaint to both the tariff loss and the birthright citizenship case, calling the latter “nasty, one sided questions on the country destroying subject of Birthright Citizenship,” even as the court prepared to decide a question with sweeping consequences for children born in the United States.
Jackson is the only Black, female member of the current Supreme Court and the most recent justice elevated to the bench. Trump’s attack followed a pattern he has used often in recent months and years, especially with Black women and other critics. He used the same “low IQ” insult against Rep. Hakeem Jeffries a day earlier in a post about Democrats opposing his war against Iran, and he has recently applied it to Jasmine Crockett, Maxine Waters, Kamala Harris, Tucker Carlson and Robert De Niro. During his first term, he called Waters “an extraordinary low IQ person,” and last year he used the same phrase about Crockett in an interview.
The friction here is not just the language. Trump is openly attacking the justices who will help determine whether one of his signature immigration goals can survive, while also trying to recast a loss on tariffs as evidence that the court’s Republican-appointed members have failed him. That leaves the court’s next ruling on citizenship carrying more than constitutional weight: it will also show whether Trump’s public pressure campaign has any effect at all on a Supreme Court that has already rebuffed him on tariffs.
For now, the answer to Trump’s complaint is already in the record. The court has not moved his way on tariffs, and it is about to rule on citizenship with the same nine justices he is accusing of betrayal. If he wanted a sign that the Supreme is not his to command, Wednesday’s schedule and Wednesday’s post gave it to him.
