Trump on Justices: They're Not 'the People I Interviewed'

The Supreme Court dealt President Trump a big blow in his push to curb mail voting on Monday, and Trump fired back in a heated social media post on Tuesday. "These are not the people I interviewed," he wrote on Truth Social. They "are merely a shell of their original selves." The president blasted the voting decision, calling it a "big loss for Republicans, and America," but he didn't stop there. Trump asserted that this court has made a string of "shockingly bad rulings that are of such magnitude that it won't be easily possible for our Country to recover or heal." He added that "it is not easy for me to write this criticism" but said he felt obligated.

In Monday's unsigned emergency order, the court blocked a plan to implement a major change in mail voting just ahead of the midterms, one in which the Postal Service would screen ballot envelopes and restrict delivery to voters on preapproved state lists using new, bar-coded envelopes. Voting rights groups and Democratic-led states led the charge against it, but some Republican election officials also warned that last-minute alterations would trigger confusion and delays, per the New York Times.

One of Trump's appointees, Brett Kavanaugh, seemed to agree with the latter point. He wrote that while the proposed rule might eventually be declared valid, implementing it so soon before the election was "arbitrary and capricious," per CNBC. In his post, Trump insisted again that mail voting is rampant with fraud, and he praised justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas as "legends" for their dissent in Monday's ruling.