This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.  It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

President Donald Trump berated Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett on Sunday, in another social media rant in which he accused the justices of being insufficiently loyal to him. “They were appointed by me,” said Trump, yet they “voted against me” in the tariffs case—and, he predicted, they “will be ruling against us on Birthright Citizenship,” too. 

According to Trump, Republican justices on the Supreme Court “often go out of their way” to oppose him in order to show how “independent” they are. He considers this a mistake. “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,” he wrote.

This is not the first time that Trump has suggested that adverse rulings by judges he appoints are tantamount to personal betrayal. In March, for example, Trump complained that Republican justices “openly disrespect the Presidents who nominate them” in misguided attempts to “prove” how “legitimate” they are. And in April, Trump described the Court’s tariffs ruling as a “slap in the face,” and lamented that “Republican Justices don’t stick together.” 

Trump has long lashed out when judges he nominated rule against his interests because he believes that his appointees are his to control. Now, Trump is publicly asserting that his expectation of fealty is, as he put it, “really OK.” Trump-appointed judges owe their positions to him, and Trump is signaling to judicial hopefuls that they should repay that debt with their court rulings.

Trump’s second-term nominees have already internalized this job requirement. They have refused to answer simple questions about whether Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. They won’t answer whether a violent mob attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They won’t answer whether Trump can use the military to assassinate his political opponents. They won’t answer whether the Constitution allows Trump to run for a third term in 2028.

At a hearing in February, after four Trump nominees wouldn’t say which 2020 presidential candidate won the popular vote, Connecticut Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal asked, “Don’t you feel kind of like monkeys or puppets here?” They didn’t answer that, either.

Underscoring the primacy of individual loyalty, Trump has sourced several nominees from his own legal teams. Emil Bove, for instance, Trump’s defense counsel in several criminal cases, got rewarded with a seat on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals last September. Later this week, the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to advance the nomination of Justin Smith to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. Smith is currently representing Trump in the president’s efforts to avoid paying an $83 million court judgment to E. Jean Carroll, a woman who successfully sued Trump for defamation after he lied about sexually assaulting her.

The only people eligible for federal judgeships in the Trump era are those whom he trusts to put what he wants above what the law requires. Earning such trust from Trump should cost them trust from everyone else. But the most important audience for judicial hopefuls is the person who can give them a nomination. And he’s telling them that being unfit for the bench is “really OK.”