Donald Trump has launched a furious attack on the US Supreme Court after it blocked his attempt to alter mail-in voting rules just weeks before the November midterm elections. The court's emergency order, issued on Monday evening, rejected an executive order that would have let the US Postal Service check mail-in ballots against a central voter database and discard those from unlisted voters, in a decision Trump claimed had "set America back at least a hundred years." The row matters because it deepens tensions between the president and a court he shaped through his own appointments, and comes amid wider fears that last-minute changes to voting procedures could disrupt the midterms.

Only two justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, dissented, with Trump calling them "legends," while all three of his own appointees—Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch—sided against him alongside Chief Justice John Roberts and the liberal justices. Kavanaugh wrote that election officials lacked sufficient time to implement the rule before polling day. Trump branded mail-in voting a "nation destroying scam" and accused the court of being "bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left," saying his own appointees were "merely a shell of their original selves." Critics had warned the proposed rules risked chaos and disenfranchising millions of the roughly one-third of US voters who cast ballots by post, and this marks the third time his administration has asked the court to intervene on the issue, following earlier defeats over birthright citizenship and tariffs.