President Donald Trump has continued his years-long criticism of the Supreme Court after it ruled against him on mail-in ballots. A decision by the High Court preserved existing mail-voting procedures nationwide just weeks before the midterm elections, dealing a significant setback to Trump's effort to impose new federal requirements. By refusing to lift a lower-court injunction, the justices ensured that states can continue using their current vote-by-mail systems as legal challenges proceed, avoiding last-minute changes that election officials warned could disrupt voting for millions of Americans.
Trump spoke out against the decision, saying the justices aren't the same people that he interviewed before nominating them to the Court. During his first term in office, the president appointed three conservative justices to the High Court—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Trump's criticism comes as views of the Supreme Court remain near historic lows and justices have spoken about concerns for their safety.
The president has had a long history of speaking out against justices, even those he nominated to the bench. In 2020, Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion that the “most troubling” of the Supreme Court’s recent behavior is that the justices have ruled in a way that benefits “one litigant over all others.” Her dissent was in a case deciding to lift an injunction on the Trump Administration’s immigrant public charge rule. Trump told reporters that Sotomayor was trying to “shame people” into voting her way.
He called on Sotomayor to resign while also calling on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to step down because of comments she made in 2016 when she criticized the president and called him a “faker.” After the Court blocked his administration’s attempt to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, Trump issued one of his most sweeping attacks on the institution during his first term. "These horrible & politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives. We need more Justices or we will lose our 2nd.
Amendment & everything else. Vote Trump 2020!" Trump posted on X. The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s claim that a sitting president was categorically immune from a state criminal subpoena.
The court also sent a case about congressional subpoenas for his financial records back to the lower courts for further review. Following the decisions, Trump complained about “political prosecution” and portrayed the cases as evidence that he was being treated differently from previous presidents. Both decisions were 7-2, with Gorsuch and Kavanaugh joining the majority in the congressional-subpoena case and concurring in the result in the state-subpoena case.
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