Trump attacked the three justices he put on the Supreme Court on Tuesday morning, hours after they joined a 7–2 order that kills his plan to run mail ballots through a Postal Service checkpoint before the November 3 midterms.
"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 wrote on Truth Social. He did not type the names Barrett, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. He did not need to. All three sat with the majority Monday evening, and none of them wrote a word in dissent. Trump called the ruling "a big loss for Republicans," complained the court "took forever," and named the two dissenters, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, as "legends."
The justices posted their order at 8:38 PM Monday, unsigned, in U.S. Postal Service v. California. The government, they wrote, "is unlikely to succeed on the merits." Kavanaugh added one paragraph of his own: the Postal Service might have the power to write such a rule, but election officials "do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections." Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia had sued. Judge Indira Talwani in Boston blocked the rule on September 5, and the Supreme Court left her block standing through Election Day.
Seven weeks. That is what the calendar gave Trump, and that is why he wanted the order — the rule's fine print shows how one county clerk's mistake would have counted for more than any voter's signature.
