Trump Turns on His Supreme Court Picks: ‘These Are Not the People I Interviewed

“These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court,” is how President Trump describes the three justices he elevated, on Truth Social, in the wake of a ruling blocking his executive order curtailing mail-in voting.The decision was handed down Monday off the Court’s so-called “shadow” or emergency docket. Only Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. Mr. Trump’s nominees — Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch — all joined with the Court’s liberals.Mr. Trump also posted on Monday night that, “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.” He cited two other occasions on which he has been rebuffed by the Nine — on tariffs and birthright citizenship — for the proposition that the justices “are merely a shell of their original selves, a court that is costing the United States Trillions of Dollars with shockingly bad rulings.”The 47th president reckons that “Republicans just got another bad decision from the United States Supreme Court, one that the Court System took forever to give, and then blamed it, in part, on no time left to implement a solution to our totally CORRUPT and out of control Mail-in voting ‘disaster.’” The decision is downstream from an executive order in March that assigned the United States Postal Service an enhanced role in managing federal elections. In August, the USPS published rules that would require states to provide lists of eligible voters and adhere to approved envelope styles. Election officials claimed the changes were “not feasible.”Justice Kavanaugh writes in a concurrence that “applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.” The Court’s majority offered no vote count or explanation beyond averring that Mr. Trump was “unlikely to succeed on the merits.”Justice Alito, writing in dissent alongside Justice Clarence Thomas, called the challenge to Mr. Trump’s authority a “Hail Mary” pass — albeit one that succeeded — and cited the president’s “broad authority to regulate the mail.” The Democrat-led states and voting rights group that challenged the regulations warned of “catastrophic harms” and “a significant risk that millions more voters would be denied the ability to vote.”In February’s Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, a six-to-three Court ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act did not grant the president the unilateral authority to impose tariffs. Mr. Trump responded that the “Supreme Court, that’s right, of the United States cost our country — all they needed was a sentence — our country hundreds of billions of dollars, and they couldn’t care less. They couldn’t care less.”The 47th president especially singled out Justices Gorsuch and Barrett, who joined the majority, for opprobrium. He declared that those justices “sicken me because they’re bad for our country.” On Monday, he harkened back to that ruling, asserting that “Certain Justices are petrified of these crazed and depraved Democrats, and are totally unable to show the courage necessary to save our America. Their horrible decision on Tariffs will be costing the U.S.A., for many years to come, Trillions and Trillions of Dollars.”Mr. Trump reserved praise for Justices Alito and Thomas, calling them “legends.” Republicans suffered another defeat at the high court last week when the justices paused the adoption of a Missouri map that would likely have granted the GOP an extra seat in the upcoming election.

Trump Turns on His Supreme Court Picks: ‘These Are Not the People I Interviewed

Trump Turns on His Supreme Court Picks: ‘These Are Not the People I Interviewed

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