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.”
