MAGA Melts Down at SCOTUS Over Its Insufficient Voter Suppression

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

MAGA Rages at Barrett

The Supreme Court’s decision yesterday, upholding a Mississippi law permitting state and local election officials to count mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but received up to five days later, has triggered the president into yet another round of unhinged demands that the Senate pass the SAVE American Act lest the country descend into communism. It also sent some of his supporters into an uncontrolled, disproportionate tailspin of attacking the decision’s author, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and forecasting new attempts to manipulate the midterm elections based on fabricated claims of voter fraud.

Donald Trump is so fixated on forcing Senate Republicans to take up the Save America Act that he called the housing bill he has yet to sign a “big yawn,” just to make sure everyone understands that he believes affordability is boring and voter suppression is a thrill. On X yesterday, MAGA influencers raged at Barrett, who Trump nominated to the court in his first term to much Republican adoration, calling her “a gigantic fucking disaster of a Supreme Court appointment,” among other insults. “WTF,” tweeted former Fox News host Megyn Kelly. On her radio show later, Kelly complained, “It’s very annoying, especially in a case like the Mississippi one where now we’re talking about whether we can ever trust election results because post-COVID, the Democrats are really enamored with this mail-in balloting thing.” Her guest, Mike Davis, a right-wing lawyer and social media troll who reportedly has Trump’s ear on judicial nominees, replied to Kelly, “we’re going to have Third World elections.” He falsely claimed that because of the Mississippi decision, Democrats will use Election Day to “figure out how many votes they’re behind, they’re going to be able to go find those votes, fill out ballots, have the their postal workers postmark those ballots, and then apparently Election Day under Barrett’s rationale is the number of days it takes for Democrats to steal the election.” (Davis has floated the prospect of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon as a possible Supreme Court nomination for Trump.)

Because there is not a sliver of evidence that mail-in ballots are susceptible to fraud, or that allowing them to be counted upon delivery after Election Day is suspect, the MAGA obsession with them is escalating into a frenzy of conspiracies that are getting more convoluted and difficult to comprehend, unless, of course, one is fluent in the lingua franca and the cast of characters of the online far right. On his podcast, Steve Bannon mused about grand juries, voter databases, “manipulated” voter rolls, supposed Chinese interference in the 2020 election, and a possible “emergency order” that would somehow lay out a “national security” reason for voting restrictions in the midterms. 

Bannon was characteristically cagey and rambling about how all of this would be carried out, and hinted that John Solomon, the conspiratorial journalist who the White House made a “special government employee” last month to run a “task force” on “transparency” would be involved. (Solomon has previously claimed to have inside knowledge of an FBI investigation into supposed voting irregularities in Maricopa County, Arizona, and Trump’s Department of Justice has used articles published on Solomon’s site Just The News in its decisionmaking.) On yesterday’s podcast, Bannon said Solomon is “restricted on saying exactly what they’re doing. But also Pulte, this is why they’re trying to stop him at DNI,” referring to Bill Pulte, Trump’s acting Director of National Intelligence, who Trump installed to carry out investigations into “rigged elections.” Last week, Pulte appointed as his chief of staff Christina Norton, a former Republican National Committee official who directed the RNC’s “election integrity” efforts, which involved Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec and other right-wing conspiracy theorists.Top Democrats on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees blasted the move.

Another L for Trump on Getting State Voter Rolls

U.S. District Judge Joseph LaPlante, who was nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush, is the 11th federal judge to dismiss a Trump lawsuit to obtain a state voter registration database, this time in New Hampshire.

Trump Secretly Awarded a $500M No-Bid Contract for His Ballroom

That is, he secretly committed $500 million of taxpayer money for his vanity project, while lying that he was building the ballroom with private donations, according to new reporting in the Washington Post. He had even once claimed that Clark Construction, the company to which he awarded the no-bid contract, had offered to build it for free. “Records also show that President Donald Trump was directly involved in negotiating some costs for the East Wing project,” the Post reports.

Talarico and Paxton Tied, NYT Poll Finds

In one of the most scrutinized Senate races this year, a New York Times/Siena poll finds a tie between Democratic state legislator and seminarian James Talarico and scandal-plagued Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. “A majority of likely Texas voters see Mr. Talarico as having good character and the right moral values, but not Mr. Paxton,” the Times reports, and “Paxton has failed to attract some voters who otherwise said they would like to see a Republican-controlled Senate.”

Hegseth Stacks Defense Policy Board With MAGA Loyalists and Billionaires

After purging the Defense Policy Board last year, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth yesterday announced new members, including MAGA theorist Michael Anton; Peter Thiel protege, conspiracy theorist, and failed Senate candidate Blake Masters; and billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, whose firm has massive investments in companies doing business with the Pentagon, including OpenAI and SpaceX. 

Hegseth’s Vaccine Blunders Persist

Because of the delay caused by Hegseth’s two-month-long effort to end flu vaccine mandates for basic training recruits, now the Pentagon has been rushing to provide the vaccines before they expire today. New vaccines will not be available until August.

More History Erasure From Trump’s National Park Service

The Philadelphia Inquirer finds mentions of slavery have been removed from sites in Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park, in addition to the National Park Service’s removal of a larger exhibit at the President’s House in Philadelphia last year. It is yet another sign that “that the administration is not letting any stone go unturned when it comes to ridding or softening even smaller mentions of slavery at Philadelphia’s most iconic historic sites ahead of the 250th anniversary.”

Trump to Ruin D.C.’s Fourth of July

District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser predicts D.C. families will stay home from the Fourth of July fireworks celebration, given the 40-minute spectacle planned by Freedom 250 to display the 851,000 fireworks is slated to start at 11:00 p.m. Trump is scheduled to speak at 7:00 p.m., and temperatures are forecast to be in the mid-90s to low 100s.

Peak 2026 Headline

MAGA Man Arrested For Masturbating At Trump’s America 250 Spectacle, via HuffPost.

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