Trump Waylaid by Amazing Series of Court Setbacks on Election Eve

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

A Thumping for the Ages

It has been the most extraordinary 24 hours of legal setbacks for President Trump since the start of his second term.

The past two years of Trump’s clashes with the federal judiciary have been building toward the ultimate test for Article III judges: Would they hold the line and protect the 2026 election against a proven lawless, coup-plotting, insurrectionist president who has relentlessly vilified and chronically defied the judicial branch?

The answer yesterday and deep into the night — even from the Roberts Court, which created this Constitution-rattling mess — was a resounding yes.

In a sweeping set of rulings from coast to coast and from district courts to the highest court, President Trump, his deeply compromised Justice Department, and his way-outside-of-its-lane Department of Homeland Security were blocked at nearly every turn from interfering in state-run federal elections.

It was as refreshing as it was resounding.

SCOTUS to Trump: Talk to the Hand

The Supreme Court — in a move for which legal experts could not immediately recall a precedent — unceremoniously smacked down a request from Trump Solicitor General D. John Sauer before it even heard from the opposing side. Sauer was seeking a Supreme Court order for California to sequester and not yet count mail-in ballots from a dubious list of 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters. The Trump DOJ had already lost in the same case twice at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and once at the district court.

By the time it went to the Supreme Court, the DOJ’s list of 20,000 voters was so thoroughly discredited that the solicitor general could not bring himself to vouch to the Supreme Court for the reliability of the list. Earlier in the day, in a separate case in D.C., a Trump DOJ lawyer under tough questioning from a federal judge admitted that it was “fair to say” the 20,000-voter list had a “high error rate.” It was a damning admission with adverse implications for the Trump administration across all of the legal challenges to its pretextual campaign against the myth of rampant noncitizen voting.

It left the solicitor general exposed in front of the Supreme Court, where all he could do was meekly gesture to the 20,000-voter list in California as something he “understood” from other components of the DOJ to be accurate. Justice Kagan referred the solicitor general’s transparently insufficient application for an injunction pending appeal to the full Supreme Court, which didn’t even ask for a response from the other side before rejecting it, with no dissents. The refusal by the six-justice conservative majority to entertain the latest bad-faith nonsense from the Trump DOJ captured the tone of the day.

Snatching Victory From the Jaws of Defeat

Even when it looked like the Trump DOJ had scored one legitimate win in court last evening, it immediately lost again. A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit overturned a lower court order that had kept the Trump DOJ from making further demands to sequester alleged noncitizen ballots and from threatening prosecution for counting those ballots. But within a couple of hours the full 9th Circuit agreed to rehear the case en banc and vacated panel’s decision. A Trump win evaporated before the ink had dried.

A quick side point on another 9th Circuit case: Even though the Trump DOJ appealed the dismissal of its lawless effort to block the certification of the U.S. Senate race in Alaska, it has not yet sought an emergency order from the appeals court. I don’t know if that’s a concession exactly or reading the writing on the wall — or, as I suspect, a strategic decision to wait to see if the election is close enough to warrant continuing to pursue the case after poll close today. Stay tuned.

Our go-to election expert, Rick Hasen, summarizes Trump’s attack on free and fair midterm elections:

It is hard to convey to nonspecialists how unlawful DOJ’s attempts to intervene in the California tabulation process and Alaska election certification are. These are not close cases, where people of good faith can disagree. The Trump Administration has been trying to assert federal control over state and local election processes, despite a lack of congressional authorization, 250 years of practice, and plenty of adverse precedent.

But there was more.

Boasberg Provides the Perfect Bookend

Much of the court action yesterday was in D.C., where a flurry of election-related cases were heard on emergency bases. U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson forced the above-mentioned DOJ admission that its alleged noncitizen voter lists were not reliable in a case brought by the union for election workers. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan barred DOJ and DHS from sending any more alleged noncitizen voter lists to state and local governments. U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton gave the Trump DOJ a Pyrrhic victory after it insisted it would not use armed federal agents as election monitors.

But it was Chief Judge James Boasberg who provided the perfect bookend to the last two years of rogue Trump attacks on the federal judiciary. It was Boasberg who was blatantly defied by the Trump administration during the unprecedented Alien Enemies Act deportation over one wild weekend in March 2025. It’s Boasberg who has been single-handedly pursuing a contempt of court inquiry into that defiance despite Trump appointees on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals slow-rolling and handcuffing him. It’s Boasberg who has come under sustained rhetorical attack from the Trump White House.

So it was poetic that Boasberg randomly wound up with two of the Trump election interference cases, and it was fitting that Boasberg flashed his independence by ruling against the Trump administration in one and for it in the other. Boasberg was convinced by an expert’s report that the Trump DOJ’s list of 20,000 noncitizen voter was not reliable and blocked it from demanding that California segregate the ballots of those who appear on the list.

But in the other case brought by the DSCC, DCCC, and DGS (among others), Boasberg ruled they lacked standing: “Even extraordinary merits questions cannot justify the extraordinary relief of a preliminary injunction or temporary restraining order if those seeking it lack standing.” But he also noted that the relief granted in the other case offered “modest relief” in this case too.

The courts universally held firm yesterday after what can best be called an uneven performance over the first two years of Trump II. But the trend lines are clear: The Trump DOJ long ago exhausted any good will, benefit of the doubt, or presumption of regularity. In the long term, that’s a tragic loss of a public good, another way Trump is leaving the Justice Department in ruins. But in the short term, it’s a essential realization by federal judges that took long in coming.

The Harshest Judicial Rebuke of Them All

Despite everything that was going on in the election realm, the most searing rebuke from any judge not just yesterday but in the entire two years of Trump II came in the Broadview 6 case in Chicago.

The case arises from Trump’s mass deportation operation, where most of the DOJ’s good will and record of fair dealing has been squandered. Not satisfied with its impunity in Operation Midway Blitz, the Trump administration aggressively prosecuted protesters of its thuggery there. The Broadview 6 prosecutions quickly unraveled, but not before the Trump DOJ allegedly made false statements in court to the judge in the case.

U.S. District Judge April Perry was unstinting in putting the screws to the Trump DOJ in a new order that was quite frankly jaw-dropping to read. She was particularly harsh on the recent conduct of the DOJ’s No. 3 official Stan Woodward, who parachuted into the case late last week even as he was being taken to the woodshed by another federal judge in the D.C. golf course case.

Judge Perry also took note of a new wrongful termination lawsuit filed by the former head of the FBI’s Chicago office which contained an extremely damaging allegation against U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros. Throughout the case, Boutros and his office have insisted that they never had any outside communications about the Broadview 6 case with either the White House or Main Justice. In his lawsuit, Douglas DePodesta claims otherwise, alleging that Boutros did discuss the case with Main Justice higher ups, including during an Oct. 7, 2025 meeting in DePodesta’s office. Two days later, prosecutors under Boutros sought the first flawed indictment against the Broadview 6.

(Even as all this was going on in Chicago, a magistrate judge in D.C. handed the Trump DOJ another stinging defeat on Monday when he dismissed its retributive prosecution of two former FBI agents in a transparently political case brought the week before the election.)

The interplay between the election cases and the mass deportation cases yesterday felt a little like a fable. The repeated bad faith, extralegal conduct, poor professionalism, and lack of candor has been most prevalent in the mass deportation cases. It is where slowly but surely federal judges had the scales removed from their eyes as to what the Justice Department has become. It took a scarily long time for many judges to catch on, but they finally have — and in the nick of time, with a free and fair election hanging in the balance.

Now the question is whether judges continue to hold the line in the potential post-election chaos.