President Donald Trump already placed three conservative justices on the Supreme Court during his first term. A liberal group is warning he could replace two of the other three conservatives with his own loyalists — and they’re not waiting for it to happen.

While none of the nine justices have announced plans to retire, two conservatives — Justice Clarence Thomas (77) and Justice Samuel Alito (76) — could conceivably retire before Trump leaves office.

Demand Justice says they aren’t waiting, they’re preparing.

“The preparations come at a moment when Democrats are feeling optimistic about their ability to break Republican control of Congress, and when there is growing fear in some corners of the party that Mr. Trump will seek to install loyalist justices who could sit on the court for decades,” The New York Times reports.

Josh Orton, the president of Demand Justice, told the Times: “If you think that Trump is willing to leave two of the three justices he thinks are most loyal on the court in their 80s past when he leaves office, you are not paying attention.”

READ MORE: ‘Darker Clouds’: Experts Warn the Unemployment Drop Is a Warning Sign

He says there is “no way” Trump, Thomas, and Alito “would ever commit the fundamental miscalculation about power that we saw from Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Barack Obama and we as a movement.”

Justice Ginsburg, who was 87, passed away during Trump’s first term, after a battle with cancer. Some on the left expressed frustration that she did not retire when Obama was president. Trump replaced her with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, moving the court to a strong 6-3 conservative majority.

“If Trump is handed another Supreme Court vacancy, we must be cleareyed and ready to make it an uphill battle,” Ezra Levin, co-executive director of Indivisible that is partnering in the Demand Justice effort, told the Times. “This will be a defining political battle, and we intend to make sure the stakes are clear to everyone.”

Orton says Trump will want to install a loyalist to replace any retiring justice.

“He’s going to want someone he knows, someone who has given him advice that he trusts. Someone that knows him personally and he feels understands him and that he can call for years to come personally to his aid.”

READ MORE: How the DOJ’s Latest Move Could Put Trump’s Records Out of Reach

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The March jobs report shows a nation where unemployment dropped slightly, to 4.3%, but some economists are cautioning the overall news may not be cause for celebration.

March was the best month for job gains since December 2024, according to Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal.

But the “full brunt” of the war is not reflected in the March report, NBC News reported, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ surveys were completed by March 12 — just 13 days into the war.

“Experts say the Iran war has already shifted the economic landscape in the weeks since the surveys for this report were conducted,” NBC adds.

“Broadly,” NBC notes, “the jobs market remains at a standstill — what many experts are calling a ‘no-hire, no fire’ environment, in which both layoffs and new placements are subdued.”

Indeed, just before the jobs report dropped on Friday, The New York Times’ Ben Casselman wrote that job growth “has slowed nearly to zero. But unemployment remains low because the labor force isn’t growing either. So the labor market is ‘balanced,’ but workers feel stuck.”

READ MORE: How the DOJ’s Latest Move Could Put Trump’s Records Out of Reach

He called it a “no-growth labor market.”

Heather Long points to “the somewhat troubling news,” noting that while the unemployment rate fell, it was “not for great reasons. There’s a big drop (almost -400k) in the labor force. The labor force participation rate also fell. It appears people stopped looking for work in March or perhaps more migrants left the workforce (or both).”

She also notes that wage growth has slowed, to 3.5 percent. As inflation rises — it is expected to go above 4 percent — workers’ paychecks will not be keeping pace with inflation.

The New York Times reports that the March jobs numbers “were collected before the energy price shock caused by the war in the Middle East tightened its grip on the global economy.”

“Forecasters have estimated that persistently higher oil prices will slow job creation and raise unemployment in a year they had expected the economy to regain some vigor,” the Times notes.

Harvard professor of economics Jason Furman adds that the three-month job creation average is 68,000. During the last year of the Biden presidency, the average monthly job creation was 186,000.

Mike Konczal, Senior Director of Policy and Research for the Economic Security Project, noticed some “darker clouds.”

“The length of time people are spending in unemployment has gotten longer in the past year, and still continues to increase,” Konczal writes. “This is no doubt adding to people’s discontent even with low overall rate.”

He also warns that it’s “not clear” the current conditions survive “the global shock of war.”

READ MORE: How Trump’s Iran War ‘Emasculated’ America: Columnist

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After the Watergate scandal, President Jimmy Carter signed the Presidential Records Act into law. It requires official presidential records to be turned over to the National Archives when each president leaves office.

In 2022, after leaving office, President Donald Trump initially refused to fully comply, forcing the National Archives to travel to Mar-a-Lago to retrieve large quantities of records, including classified documents. Later, the FBI executed a search warrant to retrieve more classified materials.

Special Counsel Jack Smith investigated Trump’s handling of classified documents and in 2023, a grand jury indicted him, partially under the Espionage Act. That case was thrown out in 2024 by Judge Aileen Cannon.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion claiming that the Presidential Records Act (PRA) is unconstitutional, as NBC News reported.

That opinion argues that President Trump does not have to turn over his presidential records at the end of his term, NBC added.

The PRA “exceeds Congress’ powers and it does so at the expense of the autonomy of the presidency, T. Elliot Gaiser wrote in the opinion, noting that Congress can’t order the papers of Supreme Court justices to be sent to the archives,” NBC reports. “The determination is a signal that the president will not turn over his documents to the archives.”

The opinion, a memorandum, reads: “You have asked whether the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (‘PRA’ or ‘Act’) is constitutional. We conclude that it is not.”

The New York Times’ Charlie Savage commented that the opinion, “Sets Trump up to claim a right to take it all in 2029-esp if he really does issue a blanket declassification order 1st.”

READ MORE: How Trump’s Iran War ‘Emasculated’ America: Columnist

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