President Donald Trump on Tuesday launched a scathing attack on the Supreme Court after it rejected his administration's last-ditch push to restrict mail-in voting ahead of this year's midterms, declaring that the justices who ruled against him were "not the people I interviewed" for the bench.
How we got here
The clash traces back to August last year, when Trump first pledged to issue an executive order ending mail-in ballots and voting machines nationwide ahead of the November 3, 2026 midterms, calling the current system "corrupt."
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He signed the order this June, seeking to give the US Postal Service a central role in deciding which ballots would be delivered to voters.
A federal judge blocked key parts of that order in late June, and the fight escalated through the courts over the following months as North Carolina and Alabama began mailing out ballots and several more states prepared to follow.
The Trump administration made a last-minute push to have the Postal Service enforce the restrictions before the midterms, arguing they were necessary safeguards. State election officials pushed back, saying there was no longer enough time to implement the changes and that their existing systems were already secure and accurate.
Late Monday, the Supreme Court sided with the states in a brief, unsigned emergency order, finding that the government was unlikely to succeed on the merits of its case, at least in time for this year's election.
Only Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas publicly dissented, arguing the restrictions should have been allowed to proceed.
Trump's response
Trump did not hold back. "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," he wrote in a lengthy social media post on 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."
He singled out the two dissenting justices for praise, calling Alito and Thomas "legends both," while turning sharply on the justices he himself nominated to the court, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, all of whom joined the majority.
"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, adding 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 also complained that the ruling had taken too long to arrive. "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!" he said.
Not the first time
Tuesday's outburst fits a familiar pattern. Trump has a long history of publicly attacking judges, often in deeply personal terms, whenever rulings go against him, and has repeatedly suggested that judges he appointed owe him personal loyalty.
He has previously expressed fury at the same court over its decisions against restricting birthright citizenship and his unilateral tariff powers, even as Barrett, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch have all ruled in his favour at other points, drawing praise from him when they did.
The court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, has in fact sided with Trump on several of his top priorities, most notably its 2024 ruling that former presidents are presumptively entitled to immunity for official acts, a decision that cleared the way for him to run for re-election without facing a criminal trial that year.
The mail-voting fight, explained
Trump has long opposed mail-in voting and falsely blamed it for his 2020 election loss, despite scant evidence of fraud. A 2025 Brookings Institution report found mail voting fraud occurred in only about four cases for every 10 million mail ballots cast.
Roughly a third of American voters currently rely on mail ballots, and voting by mail had already begun in several states by the time of Monday's ruling.
The Supreme Court's decision allows states to continue processing mail ballots using the same procedures they have followed for years, at least for this year's contest, though the door remains open for the underlying legal questions to be revisited before future elections.
