Donald Trump knows Republicans are losing. He knows he is unpopular. He knows that unless he figures out how to pull off a new plan to rig the elections, Democrats will gain control of both the House and Senate.

This morning, hours after the latest report of his sagging poll numbers, he took to social media to complain about last night's blockbuster Supreme Court ruling that blocked his scheme to cripple mail-in voting for the midterm elections.

"Republicans just got another bad decision from the United States Supreme Court," he began. Never mind that the losing party was the U.S. Postal Service — ostensibly a nonpartisan part of the federal government. Or that the Department of Justice insisted the anti-voting rule was "modest" and without partisan motive.

Donald Trump was shameless in making his point: "It is a big loss for Republicans."

His assessment is remarkably clear-eyed. Trump has been searching for a way to rig the midterms almost from the moment he came back into office.

For most of 2025, he tried to sell the idea that he could control elections and vote counting — falsely claiming that states are mere agents of the federal government when it comes to counting ballots.

In April 2025, he told House Republicans that when it came to elections, "the states are just an agent of the Federal Government."

Last August, he went further: "The states are merely an 'agent' for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them."

In February of this year, he added: "These are agents of the federal government to count the votes. If they can't count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over."

When this obviously wrong interpretation of the Constitution failed to gain traction, he moved on to promoting a legislative suppression effort — the SAVE Act. For much of the spring, he was obsessed with this anti-voting measure, which would disenfranchise millions of Americans, mostly transient voters and women.

He told House Republicans that passage of the SAVE Act "will guarantee the midterms. If you don't get it, big trouble."

Republicans soon found themselves in big trouble.

Along the way, Trump turned to other ways to rig the midterms. He forced Republican-led states to engage in mid-cycle gerrymandering. His Department of Justice sued 30 states for their full voter files.

These efforts failed too.

Democrats met the GOP gerrymanders by passing new maps of their own. Some of the new maps passed by Republicans now appear poised to backfire. Courts — including the Supreme Court last week — handed Republicans key defeats.

The DOJ's effort to obtain voter data has been a fiasco. It has lost 23 straight cases and has failed to win a single one.

It is against this backdrop of abject failure that Trump issued his March 31, 2026, executive order enlisting the U.S. Postal Service in his election subversion effort. It marked a stark escalation in his war on voting.

Had this rule been allowed to move forward, millions of Americans would have been disenfranchised. States that rely almost entirely on mail-in voting — California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington — might not have been able to hold anything approaching free and fair elections. Many others would have seen large numbers of voters unable to cast a ballot.

Trump’s Truth Social post makes it clear that he understood something the DOJ refused to admit, and the legacy media largely ignored: This was never about ferreting out nonexistent fraud. It was always about achieving partisan advantage.

Despite his loss in the Supreme Court, Trump is not done assaulting democracy. Election Day is still weeks away, and the Postal Service scheme will soon be replaced by something new — something even more sinister.

That is how Trump operates. He never accepts an election he loses, and he always works to undermine them. He recently told Republicans to "cheat like hell" and vote even if not properly registered.

In 2020, I helped lead a team of lawyers who defeated Trump and his allies more than 60 times in court after he lost the election. Each lawsuit was more desperate than the last. Each raised the stakes further. When they all failed, Trump inspired a violent insurrection on Jan. 6.

Today, my law firm is litigating 90 voting and election cases in 43 states. That number is certain to grow as Election Day nears. I expect even greater need for court action in the post-election period.

For today, the pro-democracy movement has won. Trump and his Republican allies have suffered a "big loss." But the fight isn't over. We must stay vigilant and aggressive.

The 2026 midterm elections are the most important of our lifetime. They are tied to the fate of our democracy. Trump knows that. So do we.