A federal judge on Wednesday lifted a major obstacle to President Trump’s executive order limiting mail voting, even as Democratic state officials filed a new court challenge with the midterm elections fast approaching.
The fresh round of legal wrangling comes just two days after the Supreme Court handed down a procedural ruling in Trump’s favor, and could mean the issue lands before the high court again before the pivotal contests for control of Congress. The first mailed ballots are set to be sent out next week.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston agreed to lift an order prohibiting the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out Trump’s order for November’s elections. She wrote that she was “compelled” to do so after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that a similar injunction she granted in a separate case was premature.
Talwani nevertheless said the executive order could unleash “chaos” and referred to it as “likely unconstitutional.”
The administration can now move forward and implement a Postal Service rule published late Friday. It would require states to follow a uniform envelope style for mail ballots and to give the Postal Service a list of voters eligible to receive them. Talwani found on Tuesday that the rule’s issuance technically violated her injunction, but she declined to penalize the administration.
The new lawsuit, filed by about two dozen Democratically controlled states against the U.S. Postal Service, marked a new phase in the high-stakes litigation creating confusion around the midterm elections.
It came after the Supreme Court ruled against them in a separate case, but did not say Trump’s order was legal.
The high court majority found the initial Democratic lawsuit was premature, but that was before the Republican administration issued a rule governing Postal Service delivery of mail ballots. Election officials warn it will be impossible to implement before the first wave of mail ballots are sent out next week.
“Across the country, states are already deep into preparations for the 2026 elections. Now, at the last moment, the federal government is attempting to meddle in those preparations and potentially threaten countless Americans’ right to vote,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, one of 25 Democratic attorneys general filing the lawsuit, said in a statement. “USPS has no authority to decide who can and cannot vote by mail.”
The Trump administration plan faces a third lawsuit originally filed in May in the nation’s capital, though judges there have so far declined to block it.
All previous challenges were filed before the administration published its mail ballot rule Friday night.
White House spokesperson Lauren Bis on Wednesday said the Postal Service’s proposals were “commonsense measures that protect the security of mail-in ballots” and that the administration would continue to work to implement them to boost “the safety and security of our elections.”
The Postal Service said it would not comment because of the pending lawsuit.
National Democrats on Tuesday cited the rule in asking the federal judge in the Washington case to block Trump’s order after he declined to do so last spring, saying the administration at the time had not taken concrete action. In Boston, Talwani also found that the administration had violated a separate injunction she had placed on the Postal Service in drafting the new rule, although she did not take any action against the government.
Talwani had issued the injunction against Trump’s executive order in the prior Democratic state case, which is the one the Supreme Court overturned on Monday. She also issued a second injunction Aug. 11 in a case filed by the League of Women Voters and other voting rights groups, while the Supreme Court was considering the administration’s appeal of the judge’s first order.
Trump has long targeted mail voting, which he falsely blames for his 2020 election loss and is disproportionately used by Democrats as a result of Trump’s condemnations. Since returning to power, Trump has tried to claim authority over election rules, saying he thinks Republicans should “take over” vote counting in Democratic areas.
He issued his first election executive order just months after retaking office, attempting to require documentary proof of citizenship to vote, among other changes. He has also been pushing a sweeping election bill that has stalled in the Senate amid opposition from Democrats and even some within his own party.
Riccardi and Whitehurst write for the Associated Press.
United States House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has met privately with Jared Kushner, US President Trump’s son-in-law and a top outside adviser, in a signal that the White House is seeking ways to work with Democrats if they wrestle majority control from Republicans in the midterm elections.
Little is known about the details of the discussion, which was first reported on Sunday by the New York Times. The newspaper described it as a high-profile meeting with the hope of sparking bipartisan “common ground.”
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The meeting reportedly touched on issues ranging from housing and immigration to the cost-of-living crisis. Americans are struggling under inflationary prices that Democrats fault Republicans and Trump for failing to curb.
In a statement reported on Sunday, Jeffries did not mention the private conversation but said the Republican administration needed to drop the GOP’s “my-way-or-the-highway” approach that has thus far “failed the American people”.
“To stop the madness, we have repeatedly made clear that an extremist approach will not work and will be met with forceful opposition”, the New York congressman said. “The question is whether Republicans will join us.”
Kushner also suggested that Jeffries meet with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles as a follow-up.
The reported meeting comes in the final stretch of the contentious November midterm elections in which Democrats may have a chance to win back the House majority, a highly anticipated development that would elevate Jeffries to the powerful Speaker of the House role. If they win back the seat, Democrats are expected to use their oversight power to aggressively probe the Trump administration, including allegations of self-enrichment by the president and his family.
Jeffries’ office did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
Congressional Republicans are unhappy about the matter. On Sunday, current House Speaker Mike Johnson dismissed the meeting and denigrated Kushner’s importance, telling Fox News, “I don’t know what that’s about. I know Jared has interest in lots of other things going on.”
Johnson added that Kushner “hedges bets” and is “not really directly involved in the admin, at least in the day-to-day in the White House”.
“I’m telling you what, you better not bet against the House Republicans”, the Louisiana Congressman added, saying that even if the war with Iran was not finished by November, Republicans will still turn up victorious.
The meeting also raised some eyebrows for those who worried that Jeffries was indulging one of Trump’s most corrupt cronies.
Tommy Vietor, previously an aide to former US President Barack Obama and now a co-host of the left-leaning podcast Pod Save America, noted, “Jared Kushner has no actual government job he just uses his family connections to get money from gulf autocrats and fund corrupt deals. The only way [Jeffries] should work with him is with demands for documents and subpoenas.”
Mehdi Hasan, the CEO of Zeteo, echoed Vietor, writing on social media, “The only meeting Hakeem Jeffries should be having with Jared Kushner is to tell him he’ll be subpoenaed by the House for a corruption investigation on day one of Democratic control of the House.” He added, “This is just pathetic stuff from the House Dem leader.”
William Kristol, a former neocon-turned-leading voice in the ‘Never Trump’ movement, posted, “Really? Or, as the kids say, AYFKM?” (The acronym stands for “Are you f****** kidding me?”)
During his time in Congress, Jeffries has remained a fierce critic of Trump’s bellicose foreign policy, repeatedly condemning the administration’s “reckless war of choice” against Iran and for what he called “a failure to adequately prepare for the consequences of launching a war on Iran”.
The meeting shows the depth of Republican Party angst over losing their congressional majority, particularly the House, and the need to make inroads with the opposing party as the White House seeks to stem any potential political fallout on the president.
“The American people want bold change and that’s what House Democrats will deliver”, wrote Jeffries in the statement on Sunday.
The White House did not immediately respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
Jared Kushner is a familiar messenger between Donald Trump and Democratic politicians
Jeffries and Kushner are not strangers.
The two New Yorkers united during the first Trump administration on landmark legislation to allow sentencing flexibility for certain drug offenses as a way to curtail lengthy terms in the federal prison system.
While not necessarily close, they have maintained a professional working relationship despite the repeated punches Trump has inflicted against Jeffries and the Democratic leader’s rhetoric. In Trump’s second term, Kushner has wielded disproportionate influence within the administration despite holding no official White House title. He serves as a top outside adviser and Special Envoy for Peace, shuttling to foreign diplomatic missions as the US war against Iran inches toward its sixth-month mark.
Just last week, Kushner traveled to the Middle East to convene with Qatari, Turkish and Egyptian mediators before heading to Tel Aviv where he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the fate of the 15-point Gaza peace plan that Israel had rejected. The trip came after officials from Trump’s newly-created Board of Peace confirmed that Kushner would lead a delegation to break the diplomatic deadlock, via Egypt and Israel.
Trump has only met with Jeffries once since returning to the Oval Office. After the meeting, the president posted AI-generated deepfake content of Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer alongside Jeffries wearing a sombrero with a handlebar mustache. The image was widely viewed as a racist trope and a parody of the Democratic establishment just before what would become the longest federal government shutdown in US history.
Trump has thus far been able to discount Congress as he either relies on the unchecked force of executive power to implement his priorities or the lobbying of Republicans in the House and Senate, when needed, to fall in line behind his unilateral decisions.
That may soon change if Democrats control either the House or the Senate, or both, with lawmakers increasingly keen on flexing their own power in Congress as a coequal branch of government more willing to hold the White House in check.
Big-city mayors are giving poll workers panic buttons in case election skeptics question their work. County and state officials are gaming out responses to immigration raids near voting centers.
Lawyers for Democratic states and civic groups are pre-writing legal challenges to ballot seizures. And Democratic aides in Washington are preparing members of Congress to push back in the court of public opinion against any baseless claims of voter fraud in competitive districts.
Across California and the nation, civic organizations, voting rights advocates and Democratic leaders are preparing for a raft of potential actions by the Trump administration to interfere in, subvert or deny November’s midterm vote.
President Trump, an election denier for years, has without evidence described the U.S. election system as badly corrupted by fraud and dangerously vulnerable to both domestic and foreign interference.
He has said he would do “anything necessary” to have “honest elections,” and has tried since returning to office to unilaterally rewrite the rules for voting nationwide and wrest control of elections from the states through executive orders and other administrative measures.
Now, he has declined to rule out additional and unprecedented steps to force his will on the November election, including through emergency declarations and military deployments, and in February suggested Republicans should simply take over voting in blue states.
Election experts say there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in American elections, despite Trump’s allies searching for years.
A worker looks through ballots at a Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center on Monday, June 8, 2026 in City of Industry, CA. Counting continues on ballots cast for the state’s primary election held June 2.
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
Much of the work to resist any Trump interference or power grab is being done quietly to avoid revealing too much of the strategy to the Trump administration or stoking unnecessary fear among voters.
It is designed to match what Trump’s opponents see as his three-part “interference playbook” — to “deceive” voters before the election, “disrupt” the vote itself and “deny” any unfavorable results after, said Justin Vail of Protect Democracy, a prominent litigant against the administration.
“The threats are real,” Vail said, “but the preparation is larger and more coordinated than ever before.”
The scenarios being planned for include the president deploying troops or immigration agents to polling sites to intimidate voters, fomenting unrest as a pretext to declare a national emergency, claiming fraud in the ballot counts of key congressional races or commanding the U.S. Postal Service to intervene in mail ballot delivery.
All told, the efforts amount to an unprecedented exercise to ensure the nation’s elections are safe from its own federal government.
They also reflect a deterioration in trust between states and counties overseeing elections, voting rights and pro-democracy advocates and a federal administration that has denigrated their work and tried to take control of voting away from states.
As public frustration with the economy mounts and Trump’s approval rating sinks, Democrats have become hopeful their party will retake power in Congress. Trump, meanwhile, has suggested that alleged election integrity problems will be the culprit if Republicans lose.
In California, 61% of voters recently identified federal inference in November as a “major concern,” according to a UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll co-sponsored by The Times.
“We are taking this threat really seriously,” said Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who helped form a Senate task force to prepare. “Politically, I’m very optimistic about the midterms. But I’m also deeply concerned with the president’s willingness to interfere with them — and the fact that, unlike even in 2020, where there were at least some people around him to try to constrain what he was doing, all those people are gone.”
President Donald Trump is seen on a screen as his supporters cheer during a rally on the National Mall on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. Trump supporters gathered in the nation’s capital today to protest the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory over President Trump in the 2020 election.
(Samuel Corum / Getty Images)
Much of the work is legal preparation among Democratic state attorneys general and lawyers with leading civic organizations. Nothing is being ruled out after Trump’s supporters, at his goading, violently attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, following his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
Other preparation is political, as members of Congress, mayors and other elected officials position themselves to use their bully pulpits and legislative powers to punch back. And grassroots campaigns are also unfolding, as community leaders recruit voters to defend their local elections, including online.
“This is an all-hands-on-deck task,” said Skye Perryman, president of the nonpartisan legal organization Democracy Forward. “We’re anticipating scenarios we haven’t seen before in the United States.”
Trump, who has never accepted his 2020 loss to Biden despite scores of reviews and audits confirming the result, has consistently sought to undermine Americans’ trust in elections, telling the nation in a prime-time speech last month that the voting system was “broken” and claiming that the SAVE America Act, a strict Republican-proposed voter ID and citizenship measure, is necessary to fix it.
The White House said it wouldn’t respond to hypothetical questions about the midterm election, but said anyone who breaks voting laws will be held accountable. Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, blamed “extreme liberal Democrats” for undermining U.S. confidence in elections by blocking the SAVE America Act, which Trump has failed to push through Congress.
Bis claimed voters support such changes, and said “President Trump is absolutely right: We fix this now, or we lose our country.”
Causes for concern
The fears of interference are driven by Trump’s long record of election denial; his recent insistence that the midterms are vulnerable to both domestic fraud and foreign interference; his success installing loyalists and fellow election deniers in powerful positions throughout his government; and his current administration’s many attempts to usurp control over state voting processes, including through executive orders, lawsuits and legislation.
Sen. Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) (C) departs after a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump and Republican senators at the U.S. Capitol on June 24, 2026 in Washington, DC. President Trump is visiting Capitol Hill to attend a closed-door luncheon with the Republican Senate Steering Committee to push his SAVE America Act, which would impose strict voter ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements in federal elections.
(Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)
Some analysts saw Trump’s speech last month as laying the groundwork for greater intervention in November, and he raised further alarm this month by entertaining a suggestion from conservative radio host and election conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root that the president has “the right to declare a national security emergency” to unilaterally enforce new voting restrictions.
“Stranger things have happened,” Trump responded.
The White House has previously downplayed the likelihood of immigration agents being deployed to polling locations, but Trump has refused to rule it out. Legal experts say such a move would probably be swiftly blocked by courts, as would any unlawful deployment of military troops to polls.
Some voting experts said Trump’s efforts shouldn’t be blown out of proportion, particularly given federal courts’ dim view of them to date.
David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, noted Trump’s executive orders on elections were blocked, the Justice Department is 0 for 23 in cases demanding state voter rolls, and the primaries have run smoothly with high turnout — showing the president is “having very little effect.”
Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, said it is “important that people be aware that there are threats, but to not let those threats be debilitating” or prevent them from voting.
Civic experts are urging regular voters to help debunk misinformation about voting within their communities. Democracy Forward has asked people to take one civic-minded action per day leading up to the election, while Indivisible, a progressive grassroots organization, is training volunteers nationwide to mount public push-back to any interference.
Coordination in Congress
A Senate aide who spoke with The Times on condition of anonymity said members of the Senate task force meet regularly to plan for as many potential forms of interference as possible — and that there is “no bottom” to what they’re considering.
Task force members are studying nuanced local election laws to understand how Congress members should respond to any federal interference in their home states, and working on “coordinated messaging” that all members can use in response to immigration raids or other broad interference, the aide said.
National Guard troops stand in the shade at The Park at LeDroit in Northwest on August 12, 2026 in Washington, DC. U.S. President Donald Trump is claiming credit for Washington’s dramatic crime decline a year after Trump sent thousands of National Guard troops to the nation’s Capitol, but the evidence shows crime was already falling before his federal intervention and the extent to which his policies accelerated that decline remains disputed.
(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)
They are also reading “line by line” through recent legal decisions limiting National Guard deployments and other federal actions to identify any “loopholes” the administration might exploit.
They are paying particular attention to districts with competitive congressional races and where past problems have arisen. In California, they’ve studied the recent seizure of ballots by Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and the criticism of slow ballot counting statewide, the aide said.
Schiff said the scenario he is “most concerned” about is one in which the president or his allies “seed” unrest in big cities to “give the president a pretext, Reichstag fire-like, to call out the military or invoke the Insurrection Act or call out ICE or Border Patrol.”
The Reichstag fire erupted in the German parliament four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor in 1933, and was used to justify a sweeping crackdown on political opponents and the suspension of civil liberties — ushering in Nazi rule.
Schiff said lawsuits will be a necessary but “very imperfect remedy” in such a scenario, and Democrats will need to develop a more robust response combining “litigation with mobilization” and legislative oversight.
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, which has election oversight, is helping to create an election observer program for hotly contested races, and has warned his colleagues that he will call a vote on any election-related emergency Trump declares, so that they must co-sign or resist it.
Separately in the House, staffers have been building their own “road map” for how to deal with a laundry list of “terrible things that bad-faith actors who seek to subvert the election could do,” with a principal focus on any ways they might disrupt the Jan. 3 swearing in of new Congress members, said a House aide involved in the preparations there, who spoke with The Times on the condition of anonymity.
The U.S. Capitol, on July 20, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Tom Brenner / Getty Images)
House staffers are also looking at how court imposed limits on Trump’s emergency powers might be “exploited, weaponized [or] ignored” by the administration, including the Justice Department.
A Justice Department spokesperson said the department is “working diligently” to fulfill the demands of Trump’s election-related executive order purporting to “strengthen the integrity of our elections,” which courts have blocked, and has “statutory authority to enforce our nation’s election laws, including through requesting state voter rolls,” which courts have also blocked.
Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the department’s civil rights division and has threatened local elections officials with legal consequences if they don’t comply with her voter roll demands, said her division “has a statutory mandate to enforce our federal voting rights laws, and ensuring the voting public’s confidence in the integrity of our elections is a top priority of this administration.”
State and local preparations
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said attorneys from his office and similar Democratic ones across the country are “hard at work planning, preparing, strategizing, researching, getting ready for all the different ways the Trump administration can break the law.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, right, holds a press conference at the Ronald Reagan State Building in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday, May 14, 2026.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
That includes any attempts to seize ballots, deploy federal law enforcement or the military, or command the U.S. Postal Service to interfere with mail ballots, he said. “The right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow. It’s fundamental. We need to protect it.”
Dean Logan, registrar-recorder and county clerk for Los Angeles County, said he has a responsibility to ensure that “election operations remain secure and uninterrupted” no matter the threat, and is taking steps to do so, though he declined to address potential acts by Trump. Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson said big cities are also preparing, including to prevent harassment of voters or election workers.
“Cities are where we host vote centers. It’s where the volunteers come from, where people go with their questions,” Richardson said. “We have to pay attention to national rhetoric. We have to be aware of anxiety that might — tensions that may — arise.”
Though I don’t regularly attend Mass, I fondly remember the two years in high school when I prepared for the sacrament of Communion.
In the basement of St. Boniface Church in Anaheim on weekday afternoons and weekend mornings in the mid-1990s, my sister, about 20 other teenagers and I learned about the tenets of our faith.
We were inculcated with the importance of charity, love toward all, good works and humility, and urged to carry those virtues into adulthood. I didn’t agree with everything our lay teachers espoused — why abortion should be outlawed, why necking was bad, why only men could become priests — but I learned enough important moral lessons that I still proudly call myself Catholic.
Confirmation is meant to bring recipients closer to God and “imprints on the soul an indelible spiritual mark,” according to the Vatican’s official guide to its doctrine. What especially stayed with my classmates and me was, well, us.
We were white, Filipino, Vietnamese and Latino, children of working-class parents and equals in the eyes of God. Church fairs were as likely to serve pancit and spring rolls as hamburgers and tacos. When we finally received confirmation at a special Mass at St. Boniface attended by then-Bishop Norman McFarland, we exemplified not just the future of the church but also the promise of a better tomorrow for the United States.
Our parish lived and practiced American Catholicism’s long tradition of welcoming the stranger, the outcast, the refugee — following the example and words of the Gospel we read every Sunday. But even as we committed ourselves to the path of Christ, politicians in California waged a war against illegal immigrants and anything that suggested diversity — a xenophobia that would culminate decades later with President Trump’s election.
Trump is a walking manifestation of the seven deadly sins, to the point that he has depicted himself as Jesus anda pope on social media. Nevertheless, a majority of Catholics — thankfully no one in my immediate family — voted for him in each of his three presidential elections, with support topping out at 55% in 2024, per the Pew Research Center.
Catholics were a key constituency in every sector Trump needed for his historic victory against Kamala Harris. Swing states with old-line communities like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Boom states like Nevada and Florida. And especially Latinos, who voted for Trump in numbers never before seen for a Republican presidential candidate. Latino Catholics went even harder for Trump: The Public Religion Research Institute found their support for him increased by 17 percentage points from 2016 to 2024, even as his white Catholic support dropped from 64% to 59%.
Issues from abortion to the economy to transgender rights spurred Catholics to side with Trump, but his hard-line stance against immigration was especially popular. As immigrant Catholics were being demonized, echoing previous eras of American history, too many Catholics sided with the demonizers.
Maria Marin and her husband, Martin Marin, pose with a cardboard cutout of Pope Leo XIV during the Archdiocese of Chicago’s celebration of Leo at Rate Field on June 14, 2025.
(Pat Nabong/Chicago Sun-Times via Associated Press)
A June 2024 survey by Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, which tracks American Catholic life, showed that 43% of respondents supported lower levels of immigration. A month into Trump’s second term, 41% of American Catholics thought that increased immigration in recent years had changed the U.S. “for the worse,” compared with 33% who felt it made life better, according to a Pew Research Center poll.
In the lead-up to the 2024 election, I argued about the dignity of Venezuelan and Salvadoran migrants with people from my parents’ native ranchos in Mexico, who came to this country without papers and are regular churchgoers. I sighed in disappointment as former confirmation classmates whose refugee parents fled tyrannical rulers, just like the Holy Family, posted approvingly on social media about Trump’s vow to build a bigger, nastier border wall.
Catholics have frequently exemplified the best and worst tendencies of American society. We’ve been brutal conquistadors and the huddled masses yearning to be free, trailblazing politicians and the millions who stood silently during our church’s sex abuse scandals. Trump’s support among Catholics represented a new low. But by some miracle of God, more and more of those supporters are finally seeing him for who he is.
On Aug. 12 — the feast day of Jane Frances de Chantal, the patron saint of forgotten people — the Public Religion Research Institute released a survey showing that 62% of Catholics think unfavorably of Trump, while 57% oppose his handling of immigration, both legal and illegal. If this repentance transforms into votes against MAGA in the midterms, the rest of Trump’s presidency is doomed.
The poll offers no insight into why Catholic support for Trump has cratered. The easy explanation would be the president’s enmity toward Pope Leo XIV, who has preached a gospel of kindness toward the undocumented and spoken out against the quagmire in Iran. When the Trump administration invited the native-born Chicagoan to visit the U.S. for America’s 250th anniversary, Leo instead decided to spend his Fourth of July on Lampedusa, the Ellis Island of the Mediterranean.
But the poll noted that Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, had higher favorability ratings among American Catholics during the same time in their respective reigns — 90% to Leo’s 75%.
Trump’s popularity is also collapsing among Americans as a whole. Only about a third support him, according to an a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll — the poorest showing of his second term, matching the lowest numbers of his first term. But for Catholics, it’s not just high prices, the Iran War and Trump’s drift toward despotism that makes him so onerous.
The Catholics in his government, from Supreme Court justices to Cabinet members to Vice President JD Vance, are acting as a rubber stamp for an imperious ruler, instead of imitations of Christ. Trump’s immigration sweeps are hitting American Catholicism so hard that bishops have allowed the faithful to stay home instead of attending Mass.
What reason is there left for good Catholics to support Trump? If ever a group needed to break away from him, it’s us.
What’s been especially galling about Trump’s second term, from a Catholic perspective, is his gleeful cruelty.
Proverbs 21:13 states, “Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered.” Conservatives who have criticized Pope Leo for taking on Trump over his nastiness toward the meek don’t get that his motive isn’t political — this has been standard Vatican doctrine going back to his namesake, Leo XIII. In an influential 1891 encyclical urging the world to stand by the working class, Leo XIII pointed out that sacrificing oneself “for the benefit of others, is man’s surest antidote against the insolence of the world and immoderate love of self.”
Is there any statement more contrary to MAGA than that?
Cardinals Robert McElroy, Christophe Pierre and Joseph Tobin and Archbishop Bernard Hebda speak to reporters after a Mass in solidarity with migrants at the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas on Feb. 27, 2026, in St. Paul, Minn.
(Mark Vancleave/Associated Press)
The Catholics who supported Trump may have forgotten Leo XIII’s words as they repeatedly voted for him. But that’s the beauty of our faith. We can admit our errors and seek to right them through another sacrament — confession.
“Through such an admission man looks squarely at the sins he is guilty of,” reads the catechism of the Catholic Church. That way, people can “take responsibility” for their faults and reconcile with God “in order to make a new future possible.” And the way to do that is by “doing something more to make amends for the sin.”
Catholics are supposed to confess our sins privately. But we must repent of Trump publicly and loudly at the ballot box this November and urge others to follow.
We helped usher in Trump. We must now lead in exorcising him from American society once and for all.
The former Trump lawyer, who worked on the presidential immunity case and oversaw approval of the president’s disputed White House ballroom project, will replace David Warrington on September 1.
Published On 10 Aug 202610 Aug 2026
United States President Donald Trump has named White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf as his next White House counsel, elevating a longtime legal ally to one of the administration’s most important legal positions months before November’s midterm elections.
The former Trump lawyer, who worked on the presidential immunity case and later oversaw approval of the president’s disputed White House ballroom project, will replace David Warrington on September 1, with Warrington leaving the administration for the private sector. Scharf will also hold the title of assistant to the president, moving from a role overseeing the administrative work of the Oval Office to serving as the White House’s top lawyer.
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Trump praised Scharf on Truth Social as “Tough, Strong, and Smart” and pointed to his background as a federal prosecutor and his work representing Trump in several legal cases.
From Trump’s legal team to the White House
Scharf joined Trump’s legal team in 2023 and worked on the federal election interference case brought by former Special Counsel Jack Smith. He was part of the team when the case reached the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled in 2024 that presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts.
Scharf’s ties to Trump stretch further back. During the president’s first term, Scharf worked on the confirmation of federal judges, including Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, according to The Associated Press news agency.
After Trump returned to office in January 2025, Scharf became White House staff secretary, managing documents reaching the president and regularly appearing alongside him during executive-order signings. The role has placed Scharf close to the process through which many of Trump’s major policy decisions have been implemented.
Scharf’s role in the ballroom controversy
Scharf has also been closely involved in one of the Trump administration’s most controversial projects.
Trump appointed Scharf chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission in July 2025. The commission later approved Trump’s $400m White House ballroom, planned on the site of the demolished East Wing.
The project has become part of a wider legal argument over the limits of presidential authority. The AFP news agency reported on Saturday that a federal appeals court upheld an order stopping aboveground construction, ruling that such a major alteration to the White House requires explicit congressional approval. Trump said he would take the case to the Supreme Court.
Scharf had previously maintained that the planning commission had authority over construction but not the demolition that preceded it.
US President Donald Trump holds an image of a rendering of the new White House ballroom to be built in Washington, DC, October 22, 2025 [Kevin Lamarque/Reuters]
A sensitive moment for the White House
The White House counsel advises the presidency on legal and constitutional issues, reviews legislation and executive actions, and helps coordinate the administration’s response to lawsuits and congressional investigations.
Scharf takes over at a particularly sensitive time. Democrats have pledged to investigate Trump and his administration if they gain control of Congress in November’s midterm elections, according to AP.
His appointment also continues a pattern of Trump elevating lawyers who previously represented him. Todd Blanche, who defended Trump in his criminal cases, was confirmed as attorney general on Saturday. D John Sauer, who argued Trump’s presidential immunity case before the Supreme Court, was appointed solicitor general, while former Trump lawyer Emil Bove was initially given a senior Justice Department post before being confirmed to a federal appeals court.
Roughly six weeks before the first midterm ballots are mailed out, the U.S. Postal Service is emerging as a pivotal player in an election season that will determine control of Congress.
President Trump is seeking greater control over mail balloting through an executive order while a change to how the agency processes mail is leading to criticism that it’s failing to deliver ballots on time.
Democratic officials have raised concerns over the past week about how quickly the Postal Service will process ballots after tens of thousands of them in California and hundreds in Wisconsin arrived at local election offices too late to be counted in elections earlier this year. The top election offices in Kansas and Michigan are urging voters who want to cast their ballots early to avoid the mail and instead drop them off in person.
The Postal Service replied to those concerns by saying it remains “committed to fulfilling our role in the electoral process.”
“We provide a secure, efficient, and effective way for citizens to participate when policymakers decide to use mail as part of their elections,” it said in a statement Tuesday.
Trump’s order puts more focus on mail ballots
The Postal Service faced similar questions about mail delivery in 2024, but the scrutiny this year is heightened because of an executive order Trump issued in March that seeks to create a national voter list to guide the Postal Service in deciding who gets a mail ballot.
The order has sparked multiple lawsuits and federal court orders, leading to a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court in which the administration is asking the justices to allow it to impose its restrictions on mail balloting.
Trump has lied for years about voter fraud to try to explain away his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020, and mail balloting is a favorite target, even though he has used the method himself. During a recent stop in Michigan, he falsely characterized mail balloting as “inherently corrupt” and added, “Hopefully there will be no mail-in ballots.”
A 2025 report from the research group Brookings identified about four cases of fraud for every 10 million mail ballots cast.
Despite Trump’s attacks, the method remains popular with voters of both major parties. In 2024, nearly 30% of U.S. voters cast their ballots by mail, according to federal data. In Michigan, where competitive U.S. House and Senate races could help determine the balance of power in Congress, the state said it has sent out more than 2 million absentee ballots for the state’s Aug. 4 primary.
“We want to keep vote by mail. We want to protect it. We want to expand it,” said Jonathan Smith, president of the 200,000-member American Postal Workers Union, which launched a campaign in April promoting it and is opposed to turning the Postal Service into an election administrator. “Why? Because it works.”
Legal battles intensify over Trump’s order
The Postal Service proposed a rule in June in line with Trump’s executive order that would create a national list of eligible voters, based on databases kept by other federal agencies. Only those on the list would be eligible to receive mail ballots.
Democratic officials in nearly two dozen states filed a federal lawsuit in Massachusetts. A federal judge there blocked Trump’s order last month, and an appeals court upheld that ruling, prompting Trump’s appeal to the Supreme Court. But the appeals court for the District of Columbia refused Tuesday to block the order in a separate case, calling a legal challenge premature.
Democratic senators and governors have written to the Postal Service urging it to abandon efforts to implement Trump’s order.
“Donald Trump has shown he’ll stop at nothing to meddle in our upcoming elections,” Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin said in a statement to The Associated Press. “At best, this new push will exacerbate already severe delays for mail-in voters and at worst, it will stop eligible Americans from casting their ballots.”
In a letter to Democratic senators earlier this month, the heads of the Postal Service said they were abiding by the court rulings that had halted the executive order. But Smith, of the postal workers union, told the AP on Tuesday that USPS information technology staffers who are union members are working on a planned portal for the list of eligible voters “behind the scenes.”
The Postal Service declined to respond to Smith’s statements and said it could not comment about whether it’s moving forward with work related to Trump’s order because of the litigation.
The postal workers’ union opposes the plan for a portal, a national list of eligible voters and using that list to determine who can receive a mail ballot. Smith said it shouldn’t be postal workers’ responsibility “to decide who can vote and who can’t vote.”
A plan to consolidate mail processing centers upsets officials
The Postal Service has been under financial stress for years and has been consolidating mail processing into fewer regional centers. Mail travels an average of 139 miles to reach one and sometimes 500 miles, according to a recent Brookings report.
In January, a group of mostly Democratic senators said it was concerned about a decision to end twice-daily mail dispatches from local post offices to regional processing centers. The result is that mail arriving after the only daily dispatch would go out the next day.
California officials said the change was a factor in the state rejecting more than 148,000 ballots from its June primary, with 63% of them arriving too late despite a seven-day grace period. Officials worried that some ballots were postmarked at processing facilities the day after they were dropped off at a post office, possibly invalidating them. Wisconsin officials also said hundreds of ballots from an election in April arrived late.
The Postal Service said postmarks generally are being applied with automated equipment at processing centers, “in the same manner and to the same extent as before.” It said someone who wants to make sure their ballot envelope gets a timely postmark can get a free one applied by a postal worker.
A report on the 2024 election by the USPS Office of Inspector General said the Postal Service handled more than 59 million pieces of ballot mail from Sept. 1 to Nov. 15 that year and that 97.3% arrived on time.
Some state election officials advise voters to avoid the mail
The Michigan secretary of state’s office is advising voters to hand-deliver ballots to their local clerk’s office or a drop box.
“We’ve seen these issues over a number of election cycles now — they’re always concerning, and that’s why we’ve put out that guidance,” said Deputy Secretary of State Aghogho Edevbie.
The Postal Service said its Michigan centers are not seeing processing delays.
In Kansas, concerns about late ballot deliveries in the state’s 2024 primary election prompted a quip on the social platform X from Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican: “The Pony Express is more efficient at this point.” Asked his view now, spokesperson Whitney Tempel said Schwab still believes “keeping your ballot out of the hands of the federal government is best.”
Jamie Shew, a Democrat elected to oversee elections in Douglas County, home to the main University of Kansas campus, said his office is trying to change voters’ perceptions.
“I think voters are used to, you can drop it off on Friday and we’re going to receive it by Election Day,” Shew said Tuesday. “That’s just not the reality.”
California’s state budget includes $10 million for social media campaigns and other efforts to discourage last-minute ballot mailings.
And the Postal Service said it hasn’t changed its own longstanding advice for voters: They should get their ballots in the mail at least a week before their state’s deadline for receiving them.
Hanna writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Scott Bauer in Madison, Wis., Michael R. Blood in Los Angeles, Michael Casey in Boston, and Jacqueline GaNun in Lansing, Mich., contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration urged the Supreme Court on Monday to lift a judge’s order and clear the way for state-by-state lists of citizens who are eligible to vote by mail.
Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer filed an emergency appeal and said judges in Boston had wrongly intervened too soon.
In March, Trump ordered the U.S. Postal Service to direct states to compile a list of citizens who are eligible to vote. This list would limit who may receive a mail ballot.
He also ordered the Department of Homeland Security to “compile and transmit state-specific lists of individuals who are citizens and will be 18 years of age or older at the time of an upcoming election,” Sauer said.
Lawyers for California and 22 other Democratic-led states sued, arguing the states, not the federal government, have the constitutional authority to set the rules for voting and elections.
In June, they won before a federal judge in Boston who blocked Trump’s order from going forward, at least in the 23 states which had sued. Her decision was upheld over the weekend by the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals.
In his appeal, Trump’s solicitor general focused on a procedural question, not the issue of whether the president has the legal authority to impose national rules on state-run elections.
Sauer said the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Security had not issued final specific plans to comply with Trump’s directive.
“Courts cannot enjoin implementation of Executive Orders that leave open material issues that still need to be resolved by agencies,” he wrote.
He asked the court to lift or stay the “premature injunctions.”
Time is running short, he said.
“Absent a stay … there will not be sufficient time to obtain appellate relief before the November election,” Sauer said. “That is especially true because implementation efforts for any USPS rule or DHS policy will need to begin well before November … particularly given that absentee and mail-in voting begin (in some States) several weeks prior to Election Day.”
The justices asked for a response from the 23 Democratic states by Aug. 3.
WASHINGTON — President Trump and his allies escalated attacks on U.S. elections on Friday, after the president’s prime-time effort to convince Americans that that the nation’s voting systems are fundamentally flawed, and threatened to punish California and other Democratic states that refuse the administration’s demands for voter data.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened local election officials with fines and prison if they don’t turn over voter rolls to federal officials seeking to root out purported illegal voting by non-citizens.
“Try us,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on X in response to Mullin’s threats. He added that “California has free, fair, and secure elections” and that the state “will fight for them.”
The administration’s threats — made less than four months before the November midterm elections — are a continuation of an aggressive Trump-led campaign to use the federal government to attempt to overhaul the nation’s voting systems and sow public mistrust in elections.
The administration has tried for months to compel Democrat-led states into handing over sensitive voter data to the federal government, but the efforts have run into resistance in courts, in part out of concern for privacy laws. The courts have also reaffirmed in many cases that the Constitution gives states — not the federal government — primary authority over elections.
On Friday, Mullin said his agency has found “as many as” 190,832 possible non-citizens registered to vote in California, along with more in three other Democratic-led states. He said Homeland Security arrived at those numbers by checking the four states’ public voter records.
He vowed to withhold federal election security grants from states until they agree to the administration’s demands, including having their voter registration lists “scrubbed” and their election security systems updated.
“If these states want a grant and they want to be reimbursed to run federal elections, they are going to have to implement security measures,” Mullin said at a news conference. “We need to make sure that individuals who are legally able to vote are voting.”
Newsom said the state had “no idea” where that claim came from. The administration has not made its methodology public, and the system Mullin’s department has used to check for non-citizens in the past has inaccurately flagged some citizens as non-citizens. Past election reviews have found non-citizen voting is rare.
“There is plenty of reason to be suspicious of the claims from the administration,” said Brendan Fisher, director of strategic investigations at the Campaign Legal Center, “and every reason for voters to have confidence in our elections.”
Mullin’s remarks came the day after Trump delivered a prime-time address about vulnerabilities in the election system, claims that largely were not backed up by the evidence he provided. The White House released a trove of declassified documents that fell short of showing that any American election had been affected by fraud or foreign interference.
The White House dug in on the strategy Friday morning, deploying agency heads to continue amplifying the idea of election vulnerabilities, even after fact-checks showed most of his claims were exaggerated and had been previously known, investigated or debunked.
“SAVE OUR ELECTIONS,” the White House said on X.
Trump also used his address to pressure Congress to pass legislation that would tighten voting restrictions and could make it harder for millions to register to vote and cast ballots. While hardline Republicans applauded him, others in the party have rebuffed his request.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said Friday that he did not understand why Trump is focusing on a past election when Republicans should focus on what is ahead.
“I think historically the midterms for the party in power are really tough,” Cornyn said. “So, yeah, I am concerned about it. We ought to be talking about things looking forward that our constituents are most concerned about.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said the nation’s electoral systems are safe, and while he thinks election officials need to be “vigilant,” he said he is more concerned about economic issues ahead of the midterms..
Discussing the legislation ahead of the speech Thursday, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said it would be “impossible” to carry out changes to the nation’s voting laws in time for the midterms.
“The only thing that will occur is an undermining of the integrity of our elections right now,” Tillis said on the Senate floor.
David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, called Mullin’s threats “laughable.”
“There is no significant pool of federal grant money appropriated, so this threat has no teeth for any state. None of them are expecting any significant federal funds for elections,” Becker said.
Mullin told reporters Friday the federal government plans to use public records requests to try to obtain the voter roll information in order to investigate whether non-citizens have voted. Any member of the public can make a public records request; the move signals that the government has few remaining avenues to force the state to turn over voter data.
But Mullin appeared to acknowledge the limitations, saying: “I obviously can’t force the states.” He later threatened to levy fines, penalties or criminal charges against elections officials in states that don’t comply with the government’s demand.
If their behavior wasn’t criminal, Mullin said he would make sure state and county officials — who do not work for the federal government — would “never work for the federal government again.”
More than a dozen courts have ruled against the Justice Department’s highly unusual demand for state voter rolls. The federal government is not entitled to the data under federal law, Becker said.
He said previous government investigations into non-citizen voting have found that most people flagged against DHS’ database were either citizens or non-citizens who had never registered themselves to vote.
The Trump administration has used a database from an immigration verification system to flag possible non-citizen voters, but election officials have found that method misidentified some voters. Even with citizens mistakenly included in the count, the number of possible ineligible voters was extremely low — in Texas, 0.0001% of voters.
While Trump’s speech prompted warnings from his critics that he could be laying the groundwork to take further steps to interfere with or tighten restrictions on elections, experts said he was running out of moves.
Becker predicted that Trump would not actually attempt to cancel elections or send officers to the polls and that courts would block the president if he declared a national emergency to exert control over elections.
“But I think there are people in the administration, including the president himself, who would like us all to think this is possible,” he said.
Fisher said Trump may be trying to lay the groundwork to dispute the midterm results if he doesn’t like the outcome, but said his powers to do so are limited.
“There’s safeguards and laws in place to protect the freedom to vote,” Fisher said, “and voters should tune out the noise and continue to participate in our democracy.”
MACUNGIE, Pa. — President Trump visited a Mack Trucks facility in battleground Pennsylvania on Tuesday, attempting to shift attention to the U.S. economy in his first major public event outside the nation’s capital since he signed an interim agreement to end the Iran war.
The trip to Macungie, in the Allentown suburbs, came as Trump works to put the conflict — and the higher gasoline prices it caused — in the rearview mirror as the November midterm elections draw closer.
Trump had a private tour of the facility, but his speech often felt more like a reelection rally from two years ago than an effort to promote his second-term accomplishments.
The president listed longstanding political grievances, and made only passing mentions of promoting Republicans ahead of Election Day — while spending more time bragging about the UFC fight he staged on the White House lawn in honor of his own 80th birthday than he did the economy.
At one point, Trump even called UFC fighters Bo Nickal and Anthony Cassar to the stage and mused about whether he could beat either one of them in a wrestling match if he were to “work out for the next couple of months.”
It was Trump’s fifth second-term visit to Pennsylvania, a state whose support in 2016 and 2024 helped him to win the White House. The truck factory is in a district where incumbent Republican Rep. Ryan Mackenzie faces Democratic challenger Bob Brooks in November.
“For more than 100 years, this legendary company has been making trucks right here in eastern Pennsylvania,” Trump said, “building the heavy duty machinery that keeps our economy rolling, our factories moving, and our industries roaring all across the nation.”
His visit coincided with rising prices that could color the verdict voters render on Trump’s stewardship in the fall. About one-third of U.S. adults approved of Trump’s approach to the economy, according to a June Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. That’s in line with last month for Trump on the issue.
The Iran war, which began Feb. 28, has also been a politically difficult issue for the president. Most Americans continued to disapprove of his handling of Iran, according to the June AP-NORC poll, which was being fielded as Trump announced a tentative deal with Iran and concluded just before the interim agreement was signed last week. It found that 65% of U.S. adults disapprove of how the president is handling issues with Iran, unchanged from May.
Still, while most Democrats and independents view Trump’s actions negatively, only about 3 in 10 Republicans are unhappy.
This is the kind of district that matters in November elections
Trump addressed a cheering crowd from a stage erected on the factory floor, flanked by two red, white and blue trucks and rows of workers in fluorescent safety vests under a large “American Workers First” banner.
It’s the kind of district that may prove pivotal to Republicans holding narrow control of the House, where a loss could hobble the president’s final two years in office.
Mackenzie, a freshman lawmaker, is looking to hold on to a district Democrats have targeted to flip. Brooks, president of the state firefighters’ union, has support from Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, who’s also seeking reelection this year.
Trump urged the crowd to support Mackenzie, saying of his trip, “I’m not doing this for my health.” But he devoted more energy to issues such as the U.S.-Mexico border, opposing transgender rights and decrying “Marxist” judges, while also referencing his administration’s efforts to lower prescription drug prices.
“We gotta win the midterms,” Trump said, in one of the few references he made to the midterms. Later, however, he suggested it wasn’t actually a “political season,” perhaps because he himself won’t be on the ballot in November.
On Iran, Trump suggested that the country would be smart and keep negotiating during the ceasefire. “Otherwise we’ll have to finish the job, which will take about, maybe less than a week,” he said.
An odd moment came when the president offered, “The ideology of the Muslims is slightly different than the ideology of the Catholics. We have the Catholics and the Muslims slightly different.” He didn’t elaborate.
Biden came to the same plant previously
Trump’s predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden, visited the same Mack Trucks facility in 2021 to highlight regulations aimed at promoting manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing employment peaked in 1979 at nearly 19.6 million jobs. It trended downward after the 2001 recession and the 2007-9 Great Recession. The figure now stands at 12.6 million as of May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In 2025, the truck facility got hit by market uncertainty, including sweeping tariffs that Trump’s administration imposed, and about 170 people were laid off, according to Mack spokesperson Kimberly Pupillo. She added that by the end of last year, almost 150 people were recalled to work and anyone laid off last year was given the chance to return.
There are about 2,800 workers at Mack, Pupillo said.
At a pizzeria down the road from the truck facility, workers and diners said they’d heard about the president’s visit and recalled Biden’s trip to the plant.
George Carver, a retired elementary school principal, said he wasn’t a fan of Trump’s. “I’m looking for a president who’ll clean up this mess,” he said, meaning improve the economy and better handle the war in Iran and immigration.
“I’m looking for someone who’s gonna tell the truth — that could be a Democrat or Republican,” Carver said.
Trump’s visit underscores Pennsylvania’s status as a crucial swing state.
Trump made a trip to Mount Pocono in December 2025 to road test messages that he’s addressing affordability; in July 2025, he was in Pittsburgh to tout tens of billions of dollars of recent energy and technology investments in the state; in June 2025, he was in West Mifflin to tell steelworkers he was doubling the tariff on steel imports to protect the industry; and in March 2025, he attended the NCAA wrestling championship in Philadelphia.
Denise Green, a retired software trainer, was among a handful of people protesting the visit outside a McDonald’s across the street from the plant.
Green said she was a former Republican who became a Democrat in 2007 because her original party backed policies where “all the money” was going to the rich.
Green said her key issue was Social Security funding, which she said she’ll need but is worried could run out.
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