President Donald Trump greets Supreme Court justices after addressing a joint session of Congress, March 4, 2025. Image via Screengrab / PBS.
President Donald Trump is reportedly “livid” at a Supreme Court judge he appointed for not siding with him in his desire to force states to not count mail-in ballots when they arrive after Election Day.
“He is completely livid over the mail-in ballot ruling,” senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes said on Monday. “And of course, part of this is about the justices who decided to rule against him in this case. Just a reminder — this was the Republican National Committee challenging a Mississippi law that allowed mail-in ballots that came in after Election Day to still be counted.”
She added that “if you look at the justices who voted against Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee, one of them sticks out in particular, and that is Amy Coney Barrett — whom President Trump himself appointed to the bench. Trump has been growing increasingly frustrated. We've reported multiple times that behind closed doors he has slammed Amy Coney Barrett, saying that she has not stepped up and has not done basically what he put her in place to do.”
Trump has particularly focused on reducing the influence of mail-in ballots and on passing the SAVE America Act because, as he has admitted, he hopes to disenfranchise enough Democratic voters that Republicans can retain control of the House of Representatives and Senate.
“We have heard from senators up and down that they just don't have the votes to get it through, that there aren't enough Republicans who support it,” Holmes said. “And now we're hearing that the White House as well as Speaker Johnson are putting a lot of pressure on members, working the phones, to try to get this through whatever way they possibly can. You heard President Trump saying this is now more important than ever.”
She added, “And I will tell you, Erin — I'm told by a White House official that President Trump is unlikely to sign that bipartisan housing bill. He'll just let it go into law. He's not going to veto it, but right now he views actually signing it as a betrayal to his base. He has promised to get the Save America Act through before he signs any major legislation, so he's willing to potentially not sign this very widely supported housing bill in order to try to push the Save America Act forward.”
Speaker to AlterNet earlier this month Dan Vicuña, the Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at the good government nonprofit Common Cause, accused Trump of attempting to suppress mail-in voting, demand stricter voter ID laws, obtain access to voter rules to conduct mass purges and threaten to install ICE at polling places in order to rig the 2026 midterm elections in his favor.
“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña told AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”
Vicuña added that Trump’s attempts to national elections could also be illegal.
“I think some of these attempts to federalize, to nationalize elections are clearly illegal,” Vicuña said. “You've seen some of that overreach already struck down — attempts to order independent agencies to force a strict voter ID requirement on people. That has been rejected. Common Cause is in court challenging the latest executive order to turn the United States Postal Service into some election administration agency and to create a further bureaucratic layer to make it more difficult to vote by mail. In terms of the president's authority to order around USPS, it's illegal. In terms of USPS's authority to become some sort of national election administration agency, it far exceeds the legal authority that Congress gave to the postal service. The statute describing what kind of work the postal service would do is about postal service work — processing mail and selling stamps. It has nothing to do with election administration.”
Republican lawmakers have reportedly complained that Trump has given them an “impossible task” by demanding that they pass the unpopular SAVE America Act. Trump has recently said that he views a popular bipartisan bill to create affordable housing as a “yawn” and that he cares about the SAVE America Act more than that.
“I do think, though, he is focused on making sure that our elections have some semblance of faith, trust and confidence, which they have been losing in this country for decades,” former White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley told MS NOW on Monday. “You'll remember around 65 percent of Republicans did not believe that Joe Biden won the election.”
When anchor Kasie Hunt pointed out that the only reason so many Republicans doubt the election is because Trump has repeatedly spread misinformation about it, Gidley tried to deflect, inspiring laughter. Gidley later claimed Trump is “not obsessed” with stopping voters, eliciting more laughter from inside the studio.
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