Midterms in the USA: US democracy is not completely lost after all

Seeing the US president angry is an experience in itself. On the one hand, something has happened that limits his arbitrariness or embarrasses him. On the other hand, such situations make him even more unpredictable and threatening. Exactly such a situation occurred recently. After the Supreme Court ruling on postal voting, Donald Trump was furious. "The panel is allowing the radical left to bully it into making decisions that will set America back a hundred years. These are not the judges I chose, they are a shadow of their former selves," he ranted on Truth Social.

The Supreme Court, the most powerful institution in the country next to the president, had rejected the government's efforts to make postal voting more bureaucratic. Trump's most drastic attempt to date to intervene in the midterm elections in the fall was thwarted. This particularly bothers the president because he believed for a long time that he had the Supreme Court in his pocket.

The judges of the Constitutional Court are appointed by the respective president, and Trump was able to nominate three of them for life in his first term in office: Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch. Since then, conservative judges on the panel have had a “supermajority” of six to three. Trump now believed he was dealing with a Supreme Court that would reject any attempt to legally thwart him. For a long time that actually seemed to be the case. The court dismissed more than 30 attempts to stop Trump's executive orders without thorough review.

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But at the end of last year, the Supreme Court began to cut ties with Trump and regain some of his legitimacy. The court banned him from using the Illinois National Guard as a police force. It declared tariffs on consumer products unconstitutional. It prevented him from firing one of the “governors” of the Federal Reserve. The court also prevented him from revoking his birthright citizenship. Last week, the judges disappointed twice: first with the ruling on postal voting, which made it impossible for Trump to make it more difficult for citizens to vote. Shortly thereafter, the court struck down Missouri's attempt to redraw electoral district boundaries to favor Republicans.

What has now given many Americans hope that there is still a healthy core of US democracy is causing the president to rage. On the one hand, he feels betrayed by the Supreme Court, and on the other hand, he sees his ability to manipulate the midterms dwindling. Because they threaten to become a debacle for him and his party.

The advantage that Trump expected from making postal voting more difficult was dubious anyway. It has actually been proven that Democratic voters are more inclined than Republican voters to use the postal voting process. Likewise, Democrats tend to benefit from high voter turnout. Nevertheless, studies could not find a clear advantage of a high rate of use of postal voting for either party.

Trump's attempt to make postal voting more difficult reveals one thing above all: Trump's fear of suffering a defeat in the November election. That's why he's willing to use every possible opportunity to manipulate her. This is the thing to be afraid of: the more desperate Trump is, the more unpredictable and dangerous he becomes.

No observer in the US believes that this was Trump's last attempt to intervene in the election, which is, above all, a referendum on his presidency. What other maneuvers he can think of are left to the imagination for now. The fact is that poll workers are already being prepared to deal with Justice Department employees trying to confiscate ballots under some pretext on Election Day.

The fact that the Supreme Court stood firm in the current case is only mild consolation. As New York Times columnist Frank Bruni put it: "The judges may not be Trump's lapdogs. But they are poodles at his feet."