Tag: no-latest

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Tuesday went after the Supreme Court after it rejected his push to restrict mail-in voting in this year’s midterms, saying justices who opposed him were “not the people I interviewed.”

His social media missive was just the latest in a long history of Trump assailing justices, particularly those he had nominated, who ruled against him on his administration’s most prominent initiatives. The president has been publicly furious with the Supreme Court over its decisions against restricting birthright citizenship and his ability to issue tariffs unilaterally.

On mail-in voting, the Trump administration had made a last-minute push to have the U.S. Postal Service play a central role in deciding who would be able to receive a ballot. But state election officials argued there was not enough time to make the changes for the Nov. 3 midterm elections — and said their systems were already secure and accurate.

The court ruled late Monday in an emergency order that the restrictions would most likely lose in court, at least for this year’s election.

“The Court’s inability and unwillingness to do the right thing for our Country will go down, in a very negative way, in the annals of History,” Trump wrote in a lengthy social media post Tuesday. “This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years.”

Justices Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas publicly dissented from the order, and Trump on Tuesday called them “legends both.” Trump has nominated three of the justices on the Supreme Court — Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh.

“These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves,” Trump said. He asserted that the court “is costing the United States Trillions of Dollars with shockingly bad rulings that are of such magnitude that it won’t be easily possible for our Country to recover or heal.”

The president has a lengthy track record of attacking judges, often very personally, who issue decisions that go against his wishes, and Trump has long viewed his legal appointments as owing loyalty to the person who nominated them to the bench.

So as Barrett, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch ruled against Trump at varying points over the years, the president has not hesitated to go after them publicly, while praising them if they sided with him in a case.

Yet this court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, has ruled in favor of Trump on several of his priorities, most notably the 2024 decision from the court’s conservative majority that said former presidents are presumptively entitled to immunity for all official acts. That paved the way for Trump to run for reelection without threat of a criminal trial that year.

Trump has opposed mail voting and falsely blamed it for his 2020 election loss. A report by the Brookings Institution published in 2025 found that mail voting fraud occurred in only about four cases out of every 10 million mail ballots cast.

Roughly a third of voters use mail ballots, and mail voting has already begun in some states. The decision allows states to continue sending out mail ballots under the same processes they’ve used for years.

On Tuesday, Trump also complained that the decision took too long to issue.

“It is not easy for me to write this criticism of the United States Supreme Court – it will likely cost me dearly for years to come – but I feel it my obligation and duty, as President, to do so for the America we love!” Trump said.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court dealt President Donald Trump a major blow Monday when it blocked his executive order to restrict mail ballots. But Trump’s battle to assert control over the election process is far from finished.

The stymied attempt to have the U.S. Postal Service screen mail ballots was just one piece of a broader effort involving the full power of the federal government to take more control of state-run elections.

Just days before the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s mail ballot order, the Justice Department sent threatening letters to at least 30 top election officials across the country, escalating a fight to gain access to private voter data and election records.

Federal agents are scouring voter rolls managed by states for noncitizens, despite a lack of evidence of widespread fraud. Trump’s homeland security secretary recently pushed for an investigation into whether a commonly used voting machine can be trusted, casting doubt on digital voting systems.

“This is far from over,” said Benjamin Hovland, who was ousted from the independent, bipartisan Election Assistance Commission by the Trump administration this year.

Hovland acknowledged that the Supreme Court’s decision mitigated “real-world impact” on voters and election workers, particularly since voters in some states have already begun to mail in their ballots. But he said Trump’s actions were alarming.

“What you’re seeing is using the apparatus of government, using federal agencies, using taxpayer dollars, to push that narrative that only undermines confidence in our democracy and ultimately hurts voters and election officials,” Hovland said.

Trump argues that he is trying to secure the integrity of the vote, but his claims of widespread fraud in the election system have been investigated and debunked repeatedly, and critics say his actions needlessly sow doubt about the outcome of the vote.

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

There are stark differences between now and Trump’s first term, when his attempts to undermine the election results in 2020 ran into stiff pushback not only from the courts but also from his own government officials. In his second term, Trump has surrounded himself with loyalists willing to turn his obsession over the country’s election systems into a blitz of federal actions. He has also installed election deniers in key posts.

The Supreme Court’s decision Monday did, however, add to a string of mounting losses for Trump, who said this year that he wanted to “take over” and nationalize elections. Even before the Supreme Court decision, two lower court judges ruled that Trump’s changes to mail-in balloting were most likely illegal and should not be imposed so close to the November elections.

Trump administration lawyers had urged the Supreme Court to step in and clear the way for its plan to use the Postal Service to screen ballot envelopes after they are submitted by state elections officials. The new rules would require states to submit lists of voters approved to receive mail ballots. The Postal Service would then deliver mail ballots only to the voters on the lists.

In addition to the loss Monday, Trump’s other attempts to pressure states over the election process have faced legal setbacks.

The Justice Department has sued 30 states for unredacted voter lists, which include personal information such as driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.

They have lost 23 of those cases. Decisions are pending in the rest.

The federal actions, as well as the various court decisions, have caused alarm among local election officials and voters, according to election experts.

This month, the chief election officials in seven Republican-controlled states filed a brief to the Supreme Court, arguing that with less than two months until Election Day, it was too close to the midterms to make any major changes to the election process.

Some states including North Carolina, Delaware and Alabama had already mailed out their ballots, even before the Supreme Court issued a final decision.

“Attempting to implement the rule now will almost certainly lead to mistakes, delays and confusion for both voters and election officials,” the brief stated.

But it was not just the pending Postal Service rule that has caused confusion and upended coordination among local election officials and the federal government.

The administration has also asked the Supreme Court to intervene to allow it to move forward with an effort to build citizenship lists by merging data from various agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. A lower court has so far blocked the use of that tool, which administration officials argue is needed to verify citizenship for voting, among other purposes.

In July, Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, threatened election officials in a speech and said they could face prison time if they did not comply with the Trump administration’s efforts to change election policies. Officials in the Justice Department officials have also explored whether they could bring criminal charges against state or local election officials if the administration determined they had not sufficiently safeguarded their computer systems.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which sits under the Homeland Security Department, is demanding that states change the way they conduct elections or risk losing tens of millions in federal terrorism-prevention funds.

Kimball W. Brace, the president of Election Data Services, an organization that works with local governments on election preparedness, said he did not expect the Supreme Court decision to stop Trump’s broader effort to pursue his election grievances.

“I don’t anticipate people on the Republican side not wanting to continue and push their side of the story as much as possible,” Brace said.

Distrust of the election process among voters is growing as the November elections approach. A survey from The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts showed that only 34% of U.S. adults trust government certifications of election results “a great deal” or “quite a bit,” down from 40% in 2024.

Trump has also gutted the government’s election security infrastructure. Experts warn that his cuts to agencies tasked with coordinating election security with state governments could reduce visibility into foreign influence campaigns and cyberattacks.

Brace said all the executive actions have fueled pressure on local election officials.

“They don’t want to deal with this crazy pressure that various interests and various individuals have pushed on the election administration,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.