Neil Gorsuch is on a book tour, and his itinerary reads less like a publicity schedule than a pilgrimage route through the modern right-wing media ecosystem. The conservative Supreme Court justice’s rollout for his new children’s book, “Heroes of 1776: The Story of the Declaration,” includes “Fox & Friends,” Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, Megyn Kelly’s podcast, National Review and stops at the presidential libraries of Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. 

But Gorsuch’s interviews have not been confined to “the stories of ordinary people willing to do extraordinary things,” as the book jacket reads. Throughout the tour, he has repeatedly insisted the Supreme Court is not a partisan institution. So there is something almost darkly ironic about watching Gorsuch embark on one of the friendliest media tours imaginable — one carefully routed through the movement that elevated him and celebrated his confirmation to the Supreme Court as one of the signal achievements of the modern conservative project — only to discover that even this is no longer enough for today’s right.

Although Gorsuch’s insistence that disagreements on the Court stem merely from differing “interpretive methodologies” rather than ideology landed especially awkwardly just days after the Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act, the backlash currently consuming Gorsuch is not primarily coming from the left. It’s coming from the same right-wing world his book tour was designed to court.

It all stems from Gorsuch’s third book and his first for children, which was co-written with a former law clerk and released in early May ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday. In interview after interview, he has described the United States as a “creedal nation” rooted not on race, ancestry or religion but on the ideals laid out in the Declaration of Independence: equality, natural rights and self-government. “Our nation is not founded on a religion,” Gorsuch told Reason. “It’s not based on a common culture, even, or heritage. It’s based on those ideas.” 

The response from his intended audience was instructive. Steve Cortes, a former adviser to Donald Trump and JD Vance, proclaimed on X that it is “amazing how wrong” Gorsuch is and that America is “clearly a Christian nation founded on the principles of Western Civilization, with the culture and mores of Europe.” Fox News’ Will Cain challenged the justice to a debate on the topic. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation — an institution that has spent decades positioning itself as the intellectual backbone of American conservatism and birthed Project 2025 — wrote that Gorsuch’s view was “completely divorced from our founding.” Curtis Yarvin, the monarchist pro-Trump blogger — and vice presidential friend — whose ideas have traveled with alarming speed from dissident blog posts to White House adjacency, declared that Gorsuch’s comments gave off “cuck energy.” Jeremy Carl, the conservative commentator who had to withdraw from a State Department position this year after scrutiny over remarks about protecting “white identity,” called it “the broad intellectual failure of the conservative legal movement.” 

Here was a Republican-appointed justice appearing almost exclusively before sympathetic conservative audiences, promoting a children’s civics book steeped in reverence for the Founding Fathers, defending originalism — and still getting denounced as insufficiently nationalist by the movement he was effectively marketing himself to. “Give us the precise creed, and let us know the consequences citizenship-wise for rejecting it,” Sean Davis of The Federalist wrote on X. The Washington Examiner’s Timothy HJ Nerozzie concurred: “If we’re a creedal nation, show me the required creed and explain to me the consequences for someone who refuses to follow it.” 

Under Donald Trump, delivering an utterly conventional articulation of American civic nationalism is apparently akin to surrender.

Historically, this would not have been controversial within mainstream conservatism. Reagan said essentially the same thing for decades. George W. Bush framed American identity in similarly civic terms. Even many immigration hawks traditionally argued that newcomers could become fully American through assimilation into constitutional values and institutions. But a growing reality inside Trump-era conservatism is that for an increasingly vocal faction of the right, even traditional conservative constitutionalism is now too liberal.

The timing of all this is not incidental. The Supreme Court recently heard arguments in Trump v. Barbara, the administration’s long-shot attempt to end birthright citizenship by executive order. Every federal court that had previously weighed in struck the order down, and after oral arguments in April, a majority of justices appeared likely to rule against the administration. Even the right-wing media apparatus understands the case is probably lost. And so when Gorsuch showed up on their favorite podcasts talking about America as a creedal nation, they heard it as a preview of the judicial betrayal they have been dreading — a justice warming up the audience for a ruling they won’t like. “Seems like he’s ‘prepping’ us for an absurd Birthright Citizenship ruling,” Cortes wrote on X. 

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Birthright citizenship is rooted in the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment, which declares that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” are citizens. For generations, mainstream conservatives accepted this framework, even while arguing over immigration policy itself. But as the Republican Party has become increasingly consumed by demographic panic, constitutional arguments once considered fringe have moved toward the center of MAGA politics. 

That’s why Gorsuch’s remarks felt so threatening to these figures. His language implicitly reaffirmed a vision of citizenship based on civic membership rather than ethnic inheritance. During oral arguments, Gorsuch pointed out that the word “domicile” — the legal concept at the heart of the Trump administration”s entire theory — appears nowhere in the congressional debates over the Fourteenth Amendment. “The absence” of that word, he said, “is striking.”

The response to all of this on the right has been to conclude not that the Trump administration’s legal theory is bad — which it is, and which even many conservative legal scholars have acknowledged — but that Gorsuch, who was appointed to the Court by Trump in 2018, is a traitor. The president has said publicly that he regrets listening to the Federalist Society when making his first-term appointments, calling them “weak, stupid and bad” and “an embarrassment to their families.”

And that makes Gorsuch’s media strategy even more ironic. The entire structure of the tour appears designed to reinforce conservative trust in the Court and in Gorsuch himself. He repeatedly emphasized civic literacy, institutional legitimacy, judicial independence and America’s founding ideals. He promoted himself as a steward of constitutional continuity. He wrapped the project in nostalgia for the Founding era ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary.

But the conservative movement he is addressing increasingly does not trust institutions, constitutional restraints or even the Founders themselves — unless they can be weaponized toward present-day populist goals.

That’s why the backlash escalated so quickly from disagreement into accusations of betrayal. To much of the right, the problem is not that Gorsuch misread the Constitution but that he still appears to believe in liberal democracy at all.

Gorsuch made a bet that he could maintain credibility with the institutions and media properties of mainstream conservatism while the ground shifted beneath him. He went to the right outlets. He appeared before the right crowds. He spoke in the careful, optimistic language of civic nationalism that has animated American conservatism from Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush — the shining city on a hill, the proposition nation, the idea that anyone who believes in the American creed can become an American. And he discovered, probably not for the first time, how far the modern right has drifted to a vision of America defined by blood and soil.

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