Trump blocked as 2028 race erupts

David Pakman (0:00)

Coming up today, Donald Trump suffers a real legal setback at the Supreme Court over this effort to change mail-in voting rules before the midterms. We're also going to look at the recent comments from the administration on AI, including an answer about how humanity would supposedly stop a dangerous AI that is really difficult to believe. And then there is Mitch McConnell, back in the Senate after months away, in a return that is only raising even more questions about obviously age and health, but also power and when political institutions are willing to let people step aside. We're also going to dig into the 2028 Democratic primary. I haven't been doing a lot of this, but and by the way, we also have nobody officially running yet, but there are some calculations starting about who runs and who stays out and who supports whom that are already starting. And finally, a New York Times guest essay, which raises a really, really a broader question about Donald Trump's relationship with reality and what starts to happen when a president just doesn't accept facts that contradict the story that he wants to tell. All of that and more today, plus the Bonus Show, if they will allow it.

We start today with a major legal defeat for Donald Trump at the Supreme Court. This is actually good news for people who like elections, for people who like democracy. This is all about Donald Trump's desire to impose these new restrictions on mail and voting before the midterms. And really, this is about timing because we are now just weeks from these midterms. Remember that what Donald Trump wanted were new postal service rules for this election, which would require states to completely change how they send ballots through the mail. And the big aspect of the change was that ballot envelopes would need specific features, including a specialized barcode. But most importantly, states would have to provide certain voter information to the postal service. And if the states didn't do it, the postal services rule that Trump wanted to put in place would say that those ballots could be rejected and returned. In other words, the federal government wants to have a list of approved voters. And if a voter isn't on that list, the postal service can't deliver them a ballot. But lower courts correctly blocked that rule from taking effect. So the Trump administration then went to the Supreme Court and they asked the justices to step in immediately and allow those restrictions to be implemented while the litigation continued, which is of course extraordinarily dangerous since we are just weeks, really days, but just weeks from these midterms. And now the Supreme Court has said no. The court denied Trump's request for an emergency stay. They have left the lower court injunction in place or to put it in a different way.

These new restrictions are just not going to be an effect for these midterms. This is a really big deal, especially since a lot of the motivation for Trump to do this was that he and Republicans suspect that they are going to get just flogged in these elections. Now the language that the court used in its decision is important. The majority, which said we're not going to do it, said the government is, quote, unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the preliminary injunction and that there are other factors required for emergency relief and none of them fail the administration's demand or request that these new rules stay in place while it's litigated. Now there is some important nuance here. This is not, I feel like I've said this so many times about recent Supreme Court decisions. This is not necessarily the Supreme Court permanently declaring the Postal Service can never adopt rules like these. In fact, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately that he believes there is a possibility that the Postal Service does have the authority to create this rule.

But even Kavanaugh said implementing it in this way for 2026 would be arbitrary and it would be capricious because election officials just don't have enough time to reasonably make the changes before voting is completed. Now I disagree with Kavanaugh that maybe this should or could be put forward in the future, but I agree with Kavanaugh that the lack of time to make it to put it together in a serious and carefully considered manner this time around is not possible with just a few weeks remaining before the election. And that really devastates Trump's immediate objective. Trump doesn't really care about the US Postal Service's role in elections and the rule going forward in elections in 2030 or 2032 Trump cares about it for right now. Trump is the entire fight is to change the rules now before the midterms with the idea that maybe it can save Republicans. Now vote by mail is getting going in parts of the country. Election officials have designed the ballots. They've designed the envelopes. They've established procedures. The systems are in place and you've got election officials in multiple states, including Republican officials, by the way, warning the Supreme Court. If you impose a completely new Postal Service system, this close to election day, we will have delays. We will have mistakes. We will have confusion. And what's of course ironic is that Trump and Republicans have been claiming claiming all along. These systems we have include delays and mistakes and confusion. When really they mostly don't. But the system they're trying to put in would absolutely cause that stuff. Now the administration argued, no, no, no, no.