Samuel Alito makes cryptic observation about his late mentor Antonin Scalia

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito made an enigmatic remark about his late mentor Antonin Scalia in an uncharacteristically unguarded interview.

The conservative Scalia died in his sleep nearly a decade ago, on Feb. 13, 2016, roiling that year's presidential race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but Alito told journalist and author James Rosen that his former colleague would not likely approve of the state of U.S. politics since his passing, according to a new interview published by Politico.

“Even since Nino died, things are so different," Alito said, using a nickname for Scalia set aside for close friends and family. "I so often wish he were still here. He started so much and it would have been good to have him around to see it to completion.”

Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell held Scalia's seat open for nearly a year to prevent President Barack Obama from replacing him, and Trump ultimately won the election and named Neil Gorsuch to succeed him and eventually nominated two more conservatives, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, to the court.

"Conservatives now boast a 6-3 majority on the court and are reshaping the law for a generation, but Scalia almost certainly wouldn’t have been happy to see how American politics have grown coarser and more polarized than ever before," Rosen wrote. "One of Scalia’s children, I related, had told me she felt grateful to God for taking her father at that moment because it spared the principled originalist, a celebrant of Latin Mass and the American Founding, from witnessing so much that would have upset him."

Rosen didn't elaborate on what he or Scalia's daughter thought would have upset the late jurist, who was 79 when he died, but Alito agreed.

“He would have been appalled at so much,” Alito said.