Trump Stunned as Supreme Court is Set to Screw Him

0:00From unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena, from comedy goal to relationship fails, Amazon Music's got the most ad-free top podcasts included with Prime. Because the only thing that should interrupt your listening is, well, nothing. Download the Amazon Music app today.

0:23It's likely that the United States Supreme Court is sending a message of its own to Donald Trump, having been bashed mercilessly by him when they ruled against him on the tariff decision. They've been sitting on a decision relating to voting rights for the last almost five months, a decision that many in the MAGA world thought that the Supreme Court would issue in October of 2025. We're now in March of 2026. We're less than three months till the end of the Supreme Court and still no Voting Rights Act case decision in sight. That means that Donald Trump's hopes and dreams of not only stealing your vote at the ballot box, but stealing your congressional seat, the seat for your congressperson in the maps, up to 20 of them in the Deep South, and eliminate Black representation in the South for generations is going up in flames.

1:19Because under a doctrine that the Supreme Court invented called the Purcell Doctrine, with a new modification of the Purcell doctrine from last week involving New York maps, I just don't see any way possible for the Supreme Court to issue the ruling in the next few minutes to allow states like Alabama and Louisiana and Georgia and Florida to start etch-a-sketching their way and redoing all of their maps to not only increase Republican power, but to eliminate Black representation. The calendar has worked against Donald Trump, but there are human beings on the Supreme Court, I believe, that are pulling the strings here and reminding Donald Trump who's in charge of things like declaring what the law is or should be.

2:10You're on Midas Touch and on Legal AF. Take a minute while I've got your attention. If you like what we're doing on Legal AF, the YouTube channel, or you never heard of Legal AF, the YouTube channel, come on over and become a subscriber. Let's talk about the Calais decision coming out of Louisiana. The Supreme Court went out of its way to actually hear oral argument twice. That's almost unheard of. In one case, about whether the Voting Rights Act itself, Section 2, violates the 14th Amendment when it says that you can use the Voting Rights Act to make sure that a person's right to vote is not abridged or denied.

2:53Sounds like it's consistent with the 14th Amendment, not inconsistent. But a lot of the MAGA world in the Deep South who used to have their elections monitored by federal courts because they had a nasty little habit of trying to deny the vote to their black and brown residents and then find ways to shove them all into one district so they didn't have proportional representation throughout the state, those same deep South states, you know, the Alabama, the Tennessees, the Texas, the Georgias, the Louisianas, were waiting and willing to actually call new legislative sessions of their state legislators, pull them back together to start redrawing maps if they got that ruling in October, November, December, maybe even January.

3:44But we are now in March. The term is up with the last decision in June. We're not even going to get the next round of opinions from the United States Supreme Court on their timetable till the end of March. Primaries have already happened. We had in March 3rd, North Carolina and Texas. In a couple of days, we're going to have Missouri. Ballots are printed and going out in April in Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana. So this pipe dream that Donald Trump would start the midterms with MAGA already in control of an additional 20 seats is done, as far as I'm concerned. I mean, there's other court watchers.

4:27Could they issue it after I recorded this commentary? Maybe. But I think something that happened last week in the New York case is actually something a lot of the liberals and moderates said, oh, this is a violation of the doctrine that we will not get involved with state election process or state drawing of congressional, federal congressional maps so close to an election. I didn't see it that way. I saw it as saying an exception to the Purcell doctrine, which says we are generally not going to interfere unless we see blatant racial gerrymandering. See, they didn't like the New York map because it combined a Staten Island deep red district in New York that Nicole Malliotakis sat in with a liberal community in Brooklyn to try to dilute Republican power, but also to make sure that black and brown people were properly represented on Staten Island.

5:22Delete Me makes it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. Look, as someone with an active online presence, privacy is really important to me. There's just too much personal information floating around online, and I don't have time to track it all down myself. Delete Me does all the hard work of wiping you and your family's personal information from data broker websites. Delete Me isn't just a one-time service. Delete.me is always working for you, constantly monitoring and removing the personal information you don't want on the internet.

6:03Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete.me. Now at a special discount for our listeners, get 20 % off your Delete.me plan when you go to joindeliteme.com slash legal AF and use promo code legal AF at checkout. The only way to get 20 % off is to go to joindeliteme.com slash legal AF and enter code legal AF at checkout. One more time, joindeliteme.com slash legal AF, code legal AF. So I think that's just an exception to the Purcell doctrine. If they see blatant racial discrimination, racial map drawing, they are going to step in. But they also said, we're not going to allow new maps.

6:51That's the way I read it. We're not going to allow new maps from even two months ago with a ruling in the New York case, you know, was back in March, or sorry, came out in March. That ruling was a couple of months early. They said, keep the current maps. I think that means they are not going to interfere again. Even if they issue the Calais ruling and totally gut the Voting Rights Act or tests that are used under the Voting Rights Act, it's not going to be in time for the midterms. Why is this important? And to bring our global community together. In the United States, although it sounds a little counterintuitive, the states dictate federal election rules for voting and for map drawing.

7:42So everything I'm talking about here are congressional, federal congressional maps, meaning House seats, two chambers, right? House and Senate. This is about the House, drawn by the states in a state process. That's how we split and separate powers and give to the states power under the 10th Amendment. Every two years, all 435 members of the House are up for election. Yes, they run for their lives every two years. You need 218 to get a majority vote. So right now, based on the economics of this country, joblessness of the Trump economy, price increases, the tariff increases on taxes, gas prices going to be doubling over the next month because of the wars.

8:31That means the party in power is going to lose a lot of seats. There's only a four or five seat advantage for Republicans as it is in the House. The projection now, based on the data, is that Trump's going to lose and his party's going to lose. And the Democrats could get 230, 235 seats in the House. They only need 218 to govern. In the Senate, it might sweep people in as well. But what I'm focused on are congressional maps. So the point here is that now that we're in March, it is virtually impossible for the Supreme Court to issue a ruling in time to allow these states to pull their stuff together and redraw maps to give Donald Trump an advantage.

9:13They could try. They could try to reclaim all the primary ballots. They could redraw the maps. They could run primaries again, but it's virtually impossible. There doesn't seem to be political will to do that. Now, even when Donald Trump, when we say on paper that they've gained five seats in Texas, five new Republican, more Republican seats, They've gained three seats or 10 seats in Virginia or whatever they're trying to do. That's only on paper. You don't play the game on paper. You play the game here at the ballots. If there's one theory that Donald Trump has imperiled by this strategy, other what used to be safe Republican seats are now getting strong Democratic challengers because people are pissed off that he's trying to steal their vote and steal their seat.

10:03And so it's not like, oh, plus five in Texas, because now two or three other Texas seats that used to be red are now purple or turning blue. So maybe the attempt to get plus five actually backfires and the Democrats pick up more seats. Same thing in California. It may not just be plus five in California. Many other districts, including Republican ones in California, may be imperiled because of Donald Trump's unpopularity and his radioactivity. and the fact that people see him as trying to steal the election. So we're going to continue to follow it all right here. You're on the Midas Touch Network.

10:38You've helped them grow to 6 million subscribers. Help Legal AF get to its 2 million subscriber platform. And Goals will do it with your help. So until my next report, I'm Michael Popak. Can't get your fill of Legal AF? Me neither. That's why we formed the Legal AF Substack. Every time we mention something in a hot take, whether it's a court filing or a oral argument, come over to the Substack. You'll find the court filing and the oral argument there, including a daily roundup that I do call, wait for it, Morning AF. What else? All the other contributors from Legal AF are there as well. We got some new reporting.

11:14We got interviews. We got ad-free versions of the podcast and hot takes. Where? Legal AF on Substack. Come over now to free subscribe. Thank you.