On Monday night, the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s attempt to impose new restrictions on mail-in voting ahead of the midterms, preserving lower court rulings that had already blocked the U.S. Postal Service from rolling out the changes. The names behind the vote made it notable, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh, three justices Trump personally nominated during his first term.
For Trump, that detail alone appeared to overshadow everything else in the decision.
In a lengthy Truth Social post, Trump wrote that “these are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves,” continuing 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.”
He ended on a surprisingly personal note: “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.”
A remarkable statement from the president, specifically about the Supreme Court Justices he helped put on the bench, in response to them rejecting his plan to limit mail-in voting ahead of the midterms
“These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves”
— Alayna Treene (@alaynatreene) September 15, 2026
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The ruling itself came down to something narrower.
In a brief concurring opinion, Kavanaugh wrote that “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the election,” a scheduling problem rather than a full rejection of Trump’s underlying argument. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented, siding with Trump’s position.
Several election officials, all from states that depend on mail voting, weighed in right away.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber said the decision meant her state could “finally move forward and get back to what we do best: conducting our elections without a dark cloud hanging over us, fairly, openly, for the people, by the people.”
Utah’s Republican Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson struck a strikingly similar tone from across the aisle, saying “Utahns can have confidence that the 2026 election will proceed as normal.” Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read went further still, adding that the ruling “sends a clear message to this country: Presidents don’t run elections, the people do.”
Election law experts weren’t as kind in their assessment of what the plan would have actually done
David Becker, a former Justice Department lawyer who now runs the Center for Election Innovation & Research, argued the executive order “would have done nothing for election integrity but would have imposed a vast and expensive new bureaucracy on the states.”
This isn’t the only recent clash between Trump and the court. Last week, the same conservative majority sided against Republicans in Missouri’s redistricting battle, blocking a map that would have handed the GOP another likely House seat.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
