President Donald Trump seems to be ramping up pressure on elderly conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to consider retiring as soon as possible.
The 79-year-old president strongly suggested in an interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo that he would like to replace up to three justices before the midterm election, where Democrats appear poised to take back the House and narrow the already thin Republican Senate majority, according to CNN's Aaron Blake.
“In theory, it’s two or three, they tell me," Trump told Bartiromo. "If you just read statistics, it could be two, could be three, could be one. I don’t know. I’m prepared to do it.”
Trump praised Alito as "one of the great justices of all time" but told Bartiromo he already had a short list of potential replacements and said he'd like to appoint someone young enough to serve four decades on the court, and Blake said the president had plenty of reasons to encourage the conservative duo to step down.
"As they often are, Trump’s comments about the Supreme Court were remarkably political," Blake wrote. "But he also made some good points. This is one of the biggest political questions of 2026, for a host of reasons. And the decisions made by Alito, 76, and Thomas, 77, could reverberate in many ways."
The last seven justices to retire – as opposed to dying in office like Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Antonin Scalia – have stepped down while the party they're more aligned with controlled both the presidency and the Senate, and the last 10 justices to retire were 80 years old on average.
"Both could stick it out, but if Republicans lose the Senate in November, the justices could be well into their 80s before the GOP holds the White House and the Senate again," Blake wrote.
Thomas does have one major reason to stick around, Blake noted, because he's about two years away from becoming the longest-serving justice ever, but there is mounting political pressure to avoid the situation that Ginsburg put Democrats in by declining to retire when Barack Obama was president and they had a Senate majority.
"The political risk for Trump is great because it’s looking increasingly likely that Democrats will make significant gains in the 2026 election, at least in the House," Blake wrote. "It’ll be much harder for Democrats to flip the Senate since it involves winning some red states that Trump won by double digits, but it can’t be ruled out."
A confirmation battle could help boost turnout for a seemingly unmotivated Republican base, Blake said, and Trump could also be looking to cement his influence for decades by locking in a 6-3 conservative majority for at least another generation.
"If he replaced even one of Alito or Thomas with someone in their 40s, for example, the average age of the conservative justices would be less than 60," Blake wrote. "If he replaced both with justices in their 40s, that average age would drop into the mid-50s."
If Alito or Thomas retire this year, that would mean Trump will have appointed four or five of the court's nine justices.
"Which is an idea that seems to interest him quite a bit," Blake wrote.