Trump slams Supreme Court for rejecting Missouri gerrymander 

President Donald Trump said that the U.S. Supreme Court got it wrong when it rejected a pro-GOP gerrymander in Missouri — and he isn’t happy about it.

“The Supreme Court of the United States will just not let Missouri have an Election Victory,” Trump wrote on social media. “They continuously, three times now, overrule Judges who came to the correct decisions.”

On Friday, the Court blocked Missouri from using the gerrymandered congressional map during this year’s midterms, bringing to an end a year-long battle in the state over a Trump-backed bid to redistrict mid-decade and help Republicans maintain control of the U.S. House

Last week, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Missouri could use the gerrymander — despite the Supreme Court twice declining to let the map go into effect. 

That appeals court ruling also came after the Missouri Supreme Court decided the gerrymander could not go into effect yet because voting advocates had gathered enough signatures to put it to a so-called “veto referendum” in November.

In their order Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court justices determined that the 8th Circuit’s directive to use the gerrymandered map misunderstood the Purcell principle, which holds courts should not change election rules too close to a vote to avoid causing confusion.

“The Eighth Circuit’s application of Purcell was incorrect,” the Court held. “Even though ‘federal courts should not impose changes close to an election, States are free to decide for themselves whether last-minute changes to an election are in their best interests’—subject, of course, to certain limited constraints imposed by federal law.”

Missouri state Sen. Rick Brattin (R), who’s running for the Missouri congressional district that would have been redrawn under the gerrymander, shared Trump’s lament on social media after expressing his own dismay at the Court’s decision. In his post, Brattin blamed the Missouri Supreme Court for its earlier ruling blocking the new map.

pic.twitter.com/7uMPRqadcR

— Rick Brattin (@RickBrattin) September 27, 2026

“The responsibility for this chaos rests first and foremost with the Missouri Supreme Court,” he wrote. “With the stroke of a pen, it overturned a congressional map passed by the people’s elected legislature and signed by the Governor after that map had already been used to conduct the primary election.” 

However, the Supreme Court made clear that the blame actually rests with Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, who not only forced the state to use the gerrymandered map, despite being warned of the risks, but also delayed certification of the signature petition in hopes of running out the clock on efforts to organize a referendum.

Trump is no stranger to publicly attacking the Supreme Court following decisions that don’t land in his favor, having lambasted the justices for ruling against his tariff policies, his attempt to end birthright citizenship and his failed ploy to overturn 2020’s presidential election results. 

His latest swipe comes despite the fact that, the same day that it rejected the gerrymander, the Court also greenlit Trump’s plans to use a flawed immigration database to purge voters from state rolls in his relentless campaign to find cases of illegal noncitizen voting. Such voter fraud rarely occurs and has never been found to change an election outcome.