President Trump's scattershot effort to reverse his election rejection has received a last-minute lifeline from the Supreme Court. It's about the diameter of a single strand of hair, which is just enough to unite allies and opponents in the same response: So you're saying there's a chance.
Justice Samuel Alito on Sunday speeded up the schedule for Trump's allies to explain their reason for trying to reverse the election results in Pennsylvania. The new deadline is Tuesday, significant because after that the result is immune from challenges and slates of electors may not be spurned in Congress.
The previous timetable was after that "safe harbor" deadline in federal law, meaning any ruling in Trump's favor would have come too late. Theoretically, the justices could now act in time to keep his crusade alive. But election law experts say it's much likelier Alito will actively put a spike in it rather than passively watch time expire.
Nonetheless, getting the case this far is only the latest example of how Trump's assertive contempt for the norms of electoral democracy, which have held fast for longer than two centuries, have done more than create fresh if unjustified reasons for millions of Americans to distrust their government. His assault has also created challenges to the balance of power that some of his most conservative legal allies find off-putting.
Many Trump supporters, though, still see his fight as worth having. The freshest polling about views of the election, released Monday by Gallup and the Knight Foundation, found 89 percent of Republicans concluding the democratic process did not work well this year, 82 percent of GOP voters describing the election outcome as swayed by misinformation and just 17 percent of them believing the media accurately called President-elect Joe Biden the winner.
That happened four days after Election Day, when enough votes had been tabulated in Pennsylvania to make it clear Biden would carry the state's 20 electoral votes. Three weeks later, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf certified final results showing Biden had won with an 82,000-vote margin.
Republicans led by Rep. Mike Kelly, one of Trump's earliest enthusiasts in Congress, then unveiled an extraordinary argument for why Trump should win anyway: The General Assembly exceeded its authority when it authorized universal, no-excuse absentee voting — so all 2.7 million ballots cast by mail this fall should be thrown out.
Either Trump should be allowed to claim victory based only on the 4.2 million votes cast on Election Day, Kelly argues, or else the Republican-controlled legislature should be allowed to pick electors backing the president.
The state Supreme Court unanimously dismissed the case nine days ago, ruling the GOP waited way too long to challenge the law, enacted more than a year ago with bipartisan support. That court also rebuffed Kelly's contention that no-excuse mail voting violates the state Constitution as now written and so only a statewide ballot referendum altering that document would make the process valid.
Alito, who handles emergency matters that arrive at the high court from a handful of states including Pennsylvania, at first said he'd give Kelly until Wednesday to finish his appeal. Advancing the deadline to Tuesday morning gives the court only 15 hours to act if it chooses to do so. Otherwise, Alito could put an end to the matter on his own.
"I would not read too much into this," Rick Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California-Irvine, wrote in a blog post Sunday. "It shows more respect to the petitioners, and does not make it look like the court is simply running out the clock on the petition. I still think the chances the court grants any relief on this particular petition are virtually zero."
The main reason, he and other election law experts say, is that Kelly is challenging the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's interpretation of state law. And, consistent with the conservative philosophies of most of the justices, the U.S. Supreme Court has declined in a steady stream of election law cases this year to second-guess voting rules set by state legislatures or how state courts have interpreted them.
"All the PA Supreme Court did was to hold that the state legislature didn't violate the state constitution in expanding mail-in voting," University of Texas law professor Steve Vladek tweeted. "But the U.S. Constitution has *nothing to say* about how state courts enforce their own constitutions against state legislatures. Full stop."
The Electoral College will convene a week from now in all 50 state capitals and D.C. Biden for now can expect 306 of their votes, to 232 for Trump — so even an extraordinary move by the Supreme Court invalidating the Pennsylvania outcome would leave Biden with a dozen more electoral votes than the majority required.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
____
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.