The headline landed Thursday and the reaction was exactly what you would expect. Trump regrets his Supreme Court justices. Trump turns on Gorsuch. Trump disowns Barrett.

By Thursday night every outlet that has spent 10 years waiting for conservatives to start eating each other had it up with the same framing, and a lot of people on our side read it and felt their stomach drop.

So let me tell you what I think is actually happening here, because I do not believe he is disowning anybody.

Here is what he actually said. TIME asked him straight out whether he regretted nominating Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. He said, “Yeah. Yeah.

What can I do? I put them in.” Then, “They voted against me too often.” Then, “I gave them the position of a lifetime, and they vote against me often.”

Read that again and notice what is missing. There is no accusation that they are frauds, no claim that they were never conservative to begin with. Nobody is asked to step down.

What he says is that he handed them something enormous and they have ruled against him more than he can stand. That is a complaint about a pattern of outcomes. It is not a renunciation of the people he put there.

Now the line that gave folks the most trouble, and I am not going to skip past it. He also said, “So they have loyalty to Barack Hussein Obama. They have loyalty to Biden, even though Biden doesn’t even know who the hell they are.”

That is a hot sentence. I understand why it reads like an accusation. But look at what came out of his mouth about 30 seconds later, when the interviewer asked him directly whether he wants loyalty from the Court.

He said, “I want good decisions.” And then, “The tariff decision was disastrous for the country. I want good decisions for the country.”

A man who genuinely believed those 3 were secret Democrats would not turn around in the same conversation and say he does not want loyalty. He would want them gone. He is doing something else, and it is the oldest thing in politics.

He is applying pressure. Publicly, loudly, on purpose.

Here is the part nobody says out loud. A president gets exactly one shot at the Supreme Court, and it is over the moment the robe goes on. After that he has nothing. He cannot fire a justice.

He cannot demote one. There is no budget to cut, no meeting to call, no vote to trade, nothing to hold over anybody’s head. Article 3 hands them the job for life precisely so no president can do any of that, and that is good design. I would not change a word of it.

But it leaves a man in his position with one lever and only one. He can stand up in front of the whole country and say what he thinks they are getting wrong. That is it. That is the entire toolbox.

And he has a record to point at. In February the Court struck down his tariffs 6 to 3, with Gorsuch and Barrett in the majority. In June it rejected his birthright citizenship order 6 to 3, with Barrett and Kavanaugh in the majority.

Last month all 3 of them joined the ruling that blocked his mail-in voting plan heading into the midterms. Barrett has now gone against him on the biggest questions of his second term, twice.

Whatever you make of the legal reasoning in any one of those cases, look at the shape of the thing. Three justices nominated by a Republican president, confirmed by a Republican Senate, put there by a movement that spent 40 years and an enormous amount of money building that bench. And on the questions that mattered most to that movement this year, they went the other way.

A president who said nothing about that would be a president who did not care.

Now let me take the strongest objection, because it deserves one and I am not interested in making this easy on myself. Somebody is going to say: he used the word regret. That is plain English. He was asked if he regretted putting them there and he said yeah, twice, and you cannot talk your way around it.

I am not going to try. I think he does regret it, in the way any man regrets a decision that did not give him what he was after. But regretting an outcome and disowning a person are two different things, and we know that difference everywhere else in life. A father can regret the school he chose without disowning his son.

A coach can regret a draft pick and still start the man on Sunday. Regret is about results. Rejection is about the relationship. He gave us the first one and never once gave us the second.

Here is my read, and I will call it a read rather than a fact, because I cannot see inside the man’s head. He is not talking to us. He is not really even talking to TIME. He is talking to 3 people who were going to see that interview by Friday morning and who have a docket sitting in front of them.

His immigration enforcement is headed to that Court. So is a fight over the Federal Reserve. There is more coming behind both.

He cannot lobby them, he cannot call them up, and he should not be able to. So he does the only thing still available and makes sure they understand, in public, that the man who put them in those chairs is watching how they vote and is willing to say so with his name on it.

Call that crude if you want to. I would rather have a president who says it than one who shrugs and lets it go.

And I want to be clear about something, because I think it is where people are getting turned around. He is not asking those justices to break the law for him. He said as much himself. He did not ask for loyalty when he was handed the chance to, and that is the single most important line in the whole interview.

He asked for good decisions. You can argue all day about whether his idea of a good decision and Barrett’s idea of one are the same thing. That argument is worth having. But it is a different argument than the one the headlines are selling you.

So no, I do not read this as Trump turning on the Court he built. I read it as a man reminding 3 justices which chair they are sitting in and who carried them to it.

He is not writing them off. He is not calling them traitors. He is leaning on them the only way the Constitution still allows, and hoping the next one comes back different.

The press wants this to be a civil war on the right. It is not. It is a president with one lever left, pulling it as hard as he knows how.