Trump unloads on Supreme Court appointees: ‘Shell of their original selves’

By Tom Howell Jr. - The Washington Times - Tuesday, September 15, 2026

President Trump on Tuesday scolded the Supreme Court as a letdown that’s done “irreparable and unrecoverable harm” with a series of decisions that went against his wishes.

Mr. Trump unloaded on his own appointees in unusually harsh terms after the justices refused late Monday to revive his attempt to use the post office to police mailed ballots in the midterm elections.

The president said he remains upset by other decisions, including an adverse ruling on his tariff authority and attempts to roll back birthright citizenship.

“These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves, a Court that is costing the United States Trillions of Dollars with shockingly bad rulings that are of such magnitude that it won’t be easily possible for our Country to recover or heal,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social. “It is a Court that will go down as having rendered some of the most destructive, hurtful, and damaging decisions in our Country’s history.”

Mr. Trump appointed three justices to the Supreme Court during his first term — Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. While he did not cite them by name on Tuesday, he suggested that he was fully satisfied with only longer-serving conservatives, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Mr. Trump’s anger with the court has been building for months. It bubbled over this week after a lower court blocked his plan to crack down on mail-in ballots.

He had ordered the U.S. Postal Service to get lists from the states of all people they intended to send ballots through the mail. The states would then have to send out those ballots in envelopes approved by the post office, and with bar codes so postal officials could identify and track them.

A lower court issued an injunction against the plan. The Supreme Court released a brief order Monday saying Mr. Trump was likely to lose the case when it’s heard fully, so a lower court injunction will remain on hold while lower courts continue to hear arguments.

Mr. Trump said he thinks the decision will open the floodgates to cheating in the election, reviving claims he made around his election loss in 2020, when Democrat-led states leaned into mail-in voting during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The Supreme Court’s move is a big loss for Republicans, and America itself, and makes cheating by the Radical Left ‘Dumocrats,’ on Mail-In Ballots, a much easier thing to do — And now they have an open field to do so!” Mr. Trump said.

The president said the court seemed cowed by the “radical left” and that his criticism might cost him down the road, but he felt the need to vent.

He’s particularly irked by a Supreme Court decision in February that struck down his use of a 1977 law to impose unilateral tariffs on other nations. He says the decision cost the Treasury loads of revenue and forced him to use less nimble tools to enact his trade agenda.

“The damage done to America is incalculable, and they know this, just as everyone else does — It is an irreparable and unrecoverable harm!” Mr. Trump wrote Tuesday. “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.”