Early Tuesday, President Donald Trump unleashed a blistering attack on his own choices for the Supreme Court, labeling them cowardly and “highly political.” He asserted on Truth Social that Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett “are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court,” adding that they “are only pale echoes of their former selves.”
The spark for that tirade was the Court’s rejection of the Trump administration’s bid for an emergency stay. Trump had urged the Court to block a preliminary injunction that would halt the implementation of a Postal Service plan to screen mail-in ballots, the product of an executive order he issued in March. He described the plan as essential, calling it “a remedy to our completely CORRUPT and out-of-control Mail-In voting ‘disaster,'” a spectacle he says the world is laughing at. Yet, while he lingered on what he termed the Court’s “horrendous” rulings, he renewed his objections to its decisions against his “emergency” tariffs and his efforts to curb birthright citizenship.
Trump’s latest tirade against his nominees mirrors his broader stance toward judicial review, which he sees as an illegitimate hurdle to his policy agenda and personal preferences. According to him, his appointees do not strike down his positions because they genuinely disagree with his legal views. Instead, they are “totally unable to show the courage necessary to save our America” because they “are petrified of these crazed and depraved Democrats.” He attributes this to a character flaw, rather than a careful weighing of facts and the law, to explain why they fail to side with him.
That view is at least counterintuitive. In Trump’s telling, demonstrating courage to align with the president who appointed you is the norm, while timidity would be the only explanation for not doing so.
“The Government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the
District Court’s preliminary injunction,” the Supreme Court stated on Monday as it declined to issue a stay in U.S. Postal Service v. California, the mail-in ballot case. “And the equitable factors applicable for obtaining emergency relief from this Court do not favor a stay.”
That brief order carried no signature, but the only dissenters on record were Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. Kavanaugh filed a short concurring statement. Although “there is at least a fair prospect” that the Postal Service would prevail on the merits, he said, “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.”
Seven justices, in other words, did not think a stay was appropriate, either because the Postal Service had probably overstepped its legal authority or because attempting to implement the rule now would disrupt the elections. But for Trump, those rationales were not sincere.
As he explained after the tariff ruling in February, the three Democratic nominees on the Supreme Court “automatically vote no” because they are “against anything that makes America strong, healthy, and great again.” And the Republican nominees who vote against him are, if anything, even more contemptible: They are “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical-left Democrats.” They “may think they’re being politically correct,” but “they’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.” Or as he stated on Tuesday, they are “bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years.”
Concurrently, Trump described the order in the Postal Service case as “highly political.” How so? “It is a big loss for Republicans, and America itself,” he claimed, because it “makes cheating by the Radical Left ‘Dumocrats,’ on Mail-In Ballots, a much easier thing to do.” The insinuation that the Republican appointees (likely including Chief Justice John Roberts along with Trump’s picks) were eager to enable such Democratic mischief appears inconsistent with the equally implausible claim that they were pressured into compromising their party’s interests.
For Trump, the central point is that his nominees, regardless of their motives, have betrayed him, which he contends means they have betrayed their country. “Their horrible decision on Tariffs will be costing the U.S.A., for many years to come, Trillions and Trillions of Dollars,” he asserted. “Likewise, the Supreme Court’s Decision on Birthright Citizenship is a complete and total disaster for America.”
This Court “will go down as having rendered some of the most destructive, hurtful, and damaging decisions in our Country’s history,” Trump proclaimed. Those “shockingly bad rulings,” he declared, are “of such magnitude that it won’t be easily possible for our Country to recover or heal.”
Do Trump’s nominees care? They do not! “The damage done to America is incalculable, and they know this, just as everyone else does,” he argued. “It is an irreparable and unrecoverable harm! 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.”
Historians will likely hesitate to place the Court’s rejection of Trump’s unlawful tariffs and its challenge to the 14th Amendment alongside Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Korematsu v. United States. Yet they may well be struck by this president’s unabashed contempt for the essential role of an independent judiciary as a bulwark against tyranny.
