Pete Hegseth is promoting a nihilist cult of death | Jan-Werner Müller | The Guardian

What a savage!

"It appears that members of Trump’s cabinet get chosen not despite their endorsements of violence, but because of them. Pete Hegseth was primarily known as a dapper TV host willing to defend war crimes. Markwayne Mullin is apparently still proud of challenging a witness to a fistfight at a Senate hearing; he also refuses to apologize for “understanding” an assault on fellow senator Rand Paul. Never before has an administration so openly glorified outright killing as the current White House propaganda machine does with its obscene snuff videos of the Iran war and the destruction of small boats.

Unlike with fascism in the 20th century, there is no attempt to promote or symbolically reward self-sacrifice – it is just video game-style killing at a distance, justified not with strategic objectives, but with seemingly uncontrollable emotions (“fury” and a thirst for vengeance). And all accompanied by open admissions that basic laws of warfare will be broken. Actual soldiers with longstanding codes of honor, as opposed to the fantasy world Hegseth is creating with his cliche-ridden chatter on TV, would not punch enemies when they are down.

Trump has never hidden his desire for domination and the related willingness to have his followers engage in violence, from the call to rough up people at his rallies to the pardons of even the most brutal January 6 insurrectionists.

Hegseth and company are promoting an ultimately nihilist cult of death

During his first administration, an “axis of adults” mostly held his worst impulses in check; after the Venezuela “excursion” and the realization that people on small boats can be killed with impunity, Hegseth, and perhaps even Rubio, seem drunk on the idea that special military operations could be quick and costless in American lives – and make for great TV. Trump’s fixation on visuals and props – if I show a pile of paper on TV, it means I really have divested from my companies, or I really have a great healthcare plan – is now shared across his administration.

Trump himself appears to treat a global decapitation campaign as if it were a version of The Apprentice that includes firing live ammunition – as if he gets to remove other leaders, and as if he should get to choose the successors of whoever gets kidnapped or killed.

Historically, there is an ideology that made the glorification of violence central to their propaganda. “Long live death” was a fascist slogan; Mussolini’s movement started with veterans and celebrated them as a “trenchocracy” – an aristocracy of men hardened by battle in the trenches.

Gigantic ossuaries for the war dead – some holding the bones of as many as 100,000 dead soldiers – were meant to encourage future sacrifice; the Nazis in turn presented their youth with slogans like “We are born to die for Germany”.

It seems that Hegseth and company are also promoting an ultimately nihilist cult of death. But it celebrates killing by pressing a button thousands of miles away; meanwhile, America’s own dead are dishonored, as Trump has used their repatriation to display his Maga merch and fundraise off the victims of war.

Simultaneously, faithful to his master’s desire for total domination and destruction, Hegseth announces future war crimes on live TV (“no quarter”) and encourages gratuitous cruelty: “We are punching them while they’re down.” The obscene focus on “lethality” is part of this shift towards war understood as inflicting maximum destruction and pain (as opposed to achieving strategic objectives – which the administration has of course been utterly incapable of articulating).

The reality of war itself recedes because the airwaves are filled with an endless series of entertaining images and empty talk. Hegseth, fond of laughably overwrought language and alliterations in particular (“warriors, not wokesters”), seems unable to articulate anything other than cliches (“unbreakable will”) or snippets of a Christian nationalism which flies in the face of the first amendment’s prohibiting an established religion: one cannot make it a litmus test of patriotism that citizens pray for the troops on bended knees and in the name of Jesus.

The point is not to equate the two men, but one cannot help but remember how Hannah Arendt, in her highly controversial book on the Eichmann trial, described the Nazi bureaucrat: someone utterly incapable of thinking, someone who instead just produced an endless stream of hollow phrases.

Will all this have an effect in legitimizing an illegal war? Hegseth has also created a fantasy world inside the Pentagon itself; instead of press conferences with critical questions and genuine answers, there is gentle back-and-forth between “the secretary of war” – a fantasy name, as Congress has not authorized changing the department’s name – and figures from the Epoch Times and LindellTV (the world according to “the MyPillow guy”).

Even with this extra layer of insulation from reality, Hegseth insisted that the press was not being positive enough about US attacks on Iran. Like with many Maga men performing puerile stunts for the manosphere, the fragile ego inside seems incapable of facing up to the reality of what has been unleashed so thoughtlessly.

• Jan-Werner Mueller is a Guardian US columnist"

Pete Hegseth is promoting a nihilist cult of death | Jan-Werner Müller | The Guardian

Energy Attacks in War on Iran Could Turn Economic Shock Into Long-Term Damage - The New York Times

War’s Attacks on Energy Could Turn Economic Shock Into Long-Term Damage

"A new phase targeting oil and gas infrastructure in the Persian Gulf threatens to hurt businesses and customers around the world for months or even years.

March 23, 2026  Updated 10:39 a.m. ET

Hand-painted signs at a gas station in Samut Prakan, Thailand, last week said the station was out of diesel and 95-octane gasoline.Lauren DeCicca for The New York Times

The game has changed.

From the moment the United States and Israel attacked Iran, the nightmare scenario for the global economy that most people talked about was the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, the most important choke point for oil on the planet.

But a different and more disturbing nightmare began to unfold with direct attacks on the backbone of the Persian Gulf region’s energy production: the prospect of millions of dollars’ worth of long-term damage to facilities that supply a critical portion of the world’s natural gas.

Now, instead of wondering if the war would last for days or weeks, officials and economists are speculating about effects that could last for months and years.

“We have moved from stopping transit, which is a temporary measure, to attacking infrastructure, which has long-term effects,” said David Goldwyn, a former U.S. diplomat and Energy Department official.

This new phase of the war began Wednesday, when Iran carried out a retaliatory missile strike on Ras Laffan, Qatar’s vast energy complex. That target produces roughly a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas, a transportable fuel used to heat homes, cook food, power factories and generate electricity throughout Asia and Europe.

Iran hit other refineries and gas facilities in Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia on Thursday. The strikes followed an Israeli attack on Iran’s South Pars natural gas field.

Officials and workers are still picking through the rubble, and the full extent of the damage has not been assessed. Even so, Saad Sherida al-Kaabi, Qatar’s energy minister, said Thursday that it would take up to five years to repair and would reduce the country’s export capacity 17 percent.

The attacks showed that despite Iran’s relative weaknesses, the country is exerting enormous leverage over the global economy. By using small-scale, low-cost weapons to counter highly sophisticated and expensive missile systems, Mr. Goldwyn said, the Iranians “have demonstrated a long-term threat to be able to attack infrastructure throughout the Gulf.”

A lot remains uncertain. And circumstances on the ground — and behind political leaders’ closed doors — change at a dizzying pace. Will the attacks escalate, with more on critical energy infrastructure? How long will the strait be closed? How long will the war last? What happens after the fighting stops?

At the moment, although many energy facilities in the Persian Gulf have suspended operations, most are intact.

“We’re still in a place where if the strait were to open tomorrow, most energy production in the region could come back online reasonably quickly,” taking a couple of months, said Jason Bordoff, founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.

But the situation could change at any moment if attacks continue, he added.

What is clear is that the damage from this pressure on the world’s energy supply and shipping industry has the potential to put the global economy on a different and more dangerous trajectory.

“This is by far the largest disruption of crude oil and refined products that we’ve ever seen in history,” said Jason Miller, a professor in supply chain management at Michigan State University. “Petroleum goes into everything,” he said, so the inflationary impact could be enormous.

Analysts at the energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie have already warned that $200 a barrel is not outside the realm of possibility in 2026, up from about $73 before the war.

“I couldn’t fathom we would not start seeing economies fall into a recession with energy prices at that point,” Mr. Miller said.

Higher energy prices tend to slow economic growth, increase unemployment and speed inflation.

It is also important to note that the price of diesel and jet fuel — which are processed differently — generally rise faster than the gasoline that drivers buy at the pump. And that has a disproportionate effect on moving goods around the globe, whether by plane, ship or truck.

Those elevated energy prices could eventually increase the price of practically every avocado, automobile, pair of sneakers, cellphone and drug that is bought and sold around the world.

Shippers in some regions also have to contend with soaring freight prices, closed routes, stranded ships, long detours and high-risk insurance rates.

Thousands of vessels are backed up in the Persian Gulf. And shippers like Maersk and CMA CGM have told clients that they reserve the right to dump their containers at the nearest available port. Customers would be left to pick up the additional charges.

Though oil tends to grab headlines, the supply of natural gas in many ways is at the heart of the economic fallout from the intensified fighting in the Gulf this past week.

The facilities for processing liquefied natural gas, or L.N.G., are far less numerous than oil plants. Qatar’s, the world’s biggest, has not been operating for weeks, and is damaged. That also affects the price and availability of critical materials like fertilizer and helium, a byproduct of natural gas that is used to make semiconductor chips.

Jan-Eric Fahnrich, a senior analyst at Rystad Energy, said the impact went beyond the damage to gas fields. Critical Gulf energy infrastructure that was presumed to be safe is now seen as vulnerable, he said. A precedent has been set.

“Buyers will price that risk for longer than the initial outage itself,” Mr. Fahnrich wrote in an analysis.

Countries in Asia and Europe, which depend on L.N.G., are likely to face more expensive gas prices long after the Strait of Hormuz reopens.

Governments around the globe are working to blunt the impact of soaring oil and gas prices. Austria, Brazil, Italy, Portugal and Turkey cut or suspended fuel taxes, according to the International Energy Agency. France, Hungary, Japan, South Korea, Mexico and Thailand capped some fuel prices.

In Bangladesh, universities were closed, and Pakistan closed schools for two weeks. Sri Lanka rationed fuel.

“Many consumers around the world are still bruised from past price increases during the global energy crisis of 2021-23,” the agency noted.

Yet after years being whipsawed by a global pandemic, supply chain breakdowns and painful inflation, governments are limited — by depleted budgets and daunting debt loads — in their ability to respond to another crisis.

Patricia Cohen writes about global economics for The Times and is based in London."

Energy Attacks in War on Iran Could Turn Economic Shock Into Long-Term Damage - The New York Times

‘Nobody else is responsible’: Trump to blame for Iran crisis, ex-CIA chief says | Donald Trump | The Guardian

‘Nobody else is responsible’: Trump to blame for Iran crisis, ex-CIA chief says

"Leon Panetta calls president ‘naive’ over strait of Hormuz closure and says ‘the chickens are coming home to roost’

David Smith

Leon Panetta, the former defence secretary and CIA director, at the Democratic national convention in Chicago in 2024. Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters

Donald Trump is stuck between “a rock and a hard place” after three weeks of war in Iran and “sending a message of weakness” to the world, Leon Panetta, a former US defence secretary and Central Intelligence Agency director, has told the Guardian.

Panetta, who served in the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, recalled that national security officials were always keenly aware of Iran’s ability to create an energy crisis by blocking the strait of Hormuz. That very scenario is now unfolding, leaving Trump with no exit strategy beyond wishful thinking.

“He tends to be naive about how things can happen,” Panetta, 87, who supervised the operation to find and kill Osama bin Laden, said by phone. “If he says it and keeps saying it there’s always a hope that what he says will come true. But that’s what kids do. It’s not what presidents do.”

Trump’s war began on 28 February with what it hoped would be a knockout blow. A surprise strike by Israel killed Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The US and Israel soon gained air supremacy. But the longer the conflict has raged, the more that initiative appears to be slipping away.

Thirteen US service members and, according to Iranian health officials, more than 1,400 Iranians have been killed while Khamenei was succeeded by his son, Mojtaba Khamenei. Trump has struggled to sell the war at home as oil prices rise, his polling numbers fall and his electoral coalition shows signs of splintering. He has fumed at news coverage and sent mixed signals on objectives or when the “excursion”, as he terms it, will reach a conclusion.

Panetta said: “We replaced an old guy, a supreme leader who was near death at a time when the people of Iran were willing to take to the streets with the hope that they could ultimately change their way of government. And instead today we have a more entrenched regime, we have a younger supreme leader who’s going to be there a while, and he’s much more of a hardliner than the first supreme leader. That didn’t turn out too well.”

The regime has retaliated against the US and Israel by effectively closing the strait of Hormuz, throwing global energy markets into a tailspin. A fifth of the world’s traded oil flows through the waterway.

For Panetta, it is a crisis of the president’s own making. “This is not rocket science to understand that if you’re going to conduct a war with Iran, one of the great vulnerabilities is the strait of Hormuz, and [it] could create an immense oil crisis that could drive the price of fuel sky-high.

“In every national security council I’ve been a part of where we’ve talked about Iran, that subject always came up. For some reason, either they didn’t consider that could be a consequence or they thought the war would end quickly and they wouldn’t have to worry about that.”

He continued: “Whatever it was, they were not prepared for it and they’re now paying a price because, if there was an escape here for Trump, it would be to declare victory and it’s over and we’ve been able to be successful in all of our military targets. The problem is he can declare victory all he wants but, if he doesn’t get the ceasefire, he’s got nothing.

“And he’s not going to get a ceasefire as long as Iran is holding the gun of the strait of Hormuz against his head.”

Trump has said he does not plan to put US boots on the ground in Iran but is also sending thousands of marines to the Middle East in a possible sign of a coming operation. On Friday he declined to confirm a report by the Axios news outlet that he was considering an occupation or blockade of Iran’s Kharg Island to pressure Iran to reopen the strait.

Panetta said: “He’s facing a very tough issue, which is: does he go to expand the war by trying to get the strait of Hormuz open so that he can eliminate that leverage and maybe be able to ultimately negotiate with Iran? Or does he just simply walk away and declare victory, although everybody will clearly understand that he’s failed?

“It’s a very tough position he’s in right now but nobody else is responsible for where he’s at than Donald Trump.”

Help is not on the way. Last Saturday, Trump posted that other countries may need to help keep the strait of Hormuz open, the reaction was underwhelming. On Friday, Trump branded Nato a “paper tiger” without the US and mocked its members as “cowards”. He kept allies other than Israel in the dark about his war plans for Iran.

Panetta commented: “If you’re planning a war, it’s not a bad idea to talk to your allies. Alliances are important to be able to support any kind of military effort. We’ve learned that lesson going back a long way to world war two. But he [Trump] takes a callous approach to alliances and now he suddenly finds himself in a place where he’s got to turn to allies, to Nato and to others, all of whom he certainly hasn’t treated well in his presidency, to try to help bail him out.”

The former defence secretary added with a chuckle: “The chickens are coming home to roost.”

He advises Trump to abandon his magical thinking and “face the fact” that he must use the military to open the strait, neutralise Iranian defences along the coast and deploy ships to escort oil tankers through.

“There’s no question there’s going to be lives lost and it’s clearly going to expand the war but I don’t see the alternative. He’s got to do it. He’s talked a great deal about the strength of the United States. This is a test of whether the United States can be able to deal with that situation which otherwise is not only going to prolong the war but create a lot of economic damage to the United States with those soaring fuel prices and cause what some have said is a potential worldwide recession.”

Panetta added frankly: “There’s not much choice. You’ve got to do what you have to do and, if you can open the strait, it might give you a better chance to then have a basis on which you can negotiate hopefully some kind of ceasefire. That’s the only way that he can go at this point; otherwise he will clearly have failed to find a solution.”

An ex-army intelligence officer, Panetta was White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration then served as CIA director and the 23rd secretary of defence under Obama. He is now chairman of the Panetta Institute for Public Policy based at California State University, Monterey Bay. His son, Jimmy Panetta, is a Democratic member of Congress from California and former navy reserve intelligence officer.

He is not impressed by the bombastic antics of Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host who now occupies Panetta’s old office at the Pentagon. “He’s not a secretary of defence. He is simply an enabler for whatever Trump wants him to do.”

Panetta also condemns a recent run of meme-style videos released by the White House that juxtapose war footage with Hollywood films, video games and sporting action, as well as a fundraising email that used a photo of Trump at a dignified transfer of remains of soldiers killed in Kuwait.

Panetta said: “When he or those around him started publishing pictures of football games, raising money by using pictures of our dead coming home at Dover [air force base], and doing the kind of tasteless things that he can do, he’s basically sending a message of weakness, not a message of strength to the world.

“That, unfortunately, is what the world sees right now, and I can see why he’s having problems trying to get allies to be able to respond when they’re not sure he knows what he’s doing.”

Born during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, Panetta has never seen a commander-in-chief shatter norms as Trump does. When a Tomahawk missile hit a girls’ school in southern Iran on the first day of the conflict, killing at least 175 people, most of them children, Trump sought to blame the attack on Iran, claiming its security forces are “very inaccurate” with munitions.

“Any other president of the United States would have recognised the mistake and apologise for what happened,” Panetta remarked. “He doesn’t do that. It sends an image of America that kind of fits the ugly American image that a lot of people once had of this country.”

Nobody else is responsible’: Trump to blame for Iran crisis, ex-CIA chief says | Donald Trump | The Guardian

Trump tells Iran it has 48 hours to open Hormuz or US will ‘obliterate’ its power plants | Strait of Hormuz | The Guardian

Trump tells Iran it has 48 hours to open Hormuz or US will ‘obliterate’ its power plants

"US president threatens to take out Iranian energy facilities – ‘starting with the biggest one first’ – if Tehran does not reopen the strait

The US president, Donald Trump, accompanied by his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, speaks with reporters. Photograph: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

Donald Trump has given Iran 48 hours to reopen the strait of Hormuz to shipping or face the destruction of its energy infrastructure, as Tehran launched its most destructive attack yet on Israel.

The ultimatum, made just a day after the US president said he was considering “winding down” military operations after three weeks of war, came as the key oil passage remained effectively closed and thousands more US Marines headed to the Middle East.

Trump wrote on Truth Social that the US would “hit and obliterate” Iranian power plants – “starting with the biggest one first” – if Tehran did not fully reopen the strait within 48 hours, or 23:44 GMT on Monday according to the time of his post.

The tanker Rarity sits at anchor off the Sultan Qaboos port in Muscat, Oman. Photograph: Stelios Misinas/Reuters

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Tehran had imposed restrictions only on vessels from countries involved in attacks against Iran, and would assist others that stayed out of the conflict.

In response to Trump’s threat, Iran’s army said it will target energy and desalination infrastructure “belonging to the US and the regime in the region,” according to the Fars news agency.

Trump’s ultimatum came hours after two Iranian missiles struck southern Israel, injuring more than 100 people in the most destructive attack since the war began. The Israel prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, vowed to retaliate “on all fronts”.

The strikes, which slipped through Israel’s missile defence systems, tore open the facades of residential buildings and carved craters into the ground.

First responders said 84 people were injured in the town of Arad, 10 of them seriously. Hours earlier, 33 were wounded in nearby Dimona, where AFPTV footage showed a large hole gouged into the ground next to piles of rubble and twisted metal.

Dimona hosts a facility widely believed to be the site of the Middle East’s only nuclear arsenal, although Israel has never admitted to possessing nuclear weapons.

The Israeli army told Agence France-Presse there had been a “direct missile hit on a building” in Dimona, with casualties reported at multiple sites, including a 10-year-old boy in serious condition with shrapnel wounds.

Emergency workers gather in the early hours at the site of an Iranian missile strike in Arad, Israel. Photograph: Erik Marmor/Getty Images

Netanyahu vowed to continue striking Iran. Hours later, the Israeli military said its forces had launched a wave of strikes on Tehran.

Iran said the targeting of Dimona was retaliation for Israeli strikes on its Natanz nuclear facility, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) saying forces also targeted other southern Israeli towns as well as military sites in Kuwait and the UAE.

After the Natanz attack, the UN nuclear watchdog chief, Rafael Grossi, reiterated his call for “military restraint to avoid any risk of a nuclear accident”.

The Natanz facility hosts underground centrifuges used to enrich uranium for Iran’s disputed nuclear programme; it sustained damage in the June 2025 war.

The Israeli military denied it was behind the Natanz strike, but said it had struck a facility at a Tehran university that it claimed was being used to develop nuclear weapon components for Iran’s ballistic missile programme.

A satellite image shows the Natanz nuclear facility with some damage to the buildings. Photograph: VANTOR/Reuters

The United Arab Emirates said on Saturday it faced aerial attacks after Iran warned it against allowing strikes from its territory on disputed islands near the strait of Hormuz.

Iran has choked the vital waterway, which carries a fifth of global crude oil trade in peacetime.

The standoff has sent crude oil prices soaring, with North Sea Brent crude now trading above $105 a barrel, as long-term consequences for the global economy become an acute concern.

A joint statement from the leaders of several countries – including the UK, France, Italy, Germany, South Korea, Australia, the UAE and Bahrain – condemned the “de facto closure of the strait of Hormuz by Iranian forces”.

“We express our readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait,” they said.

Trump has slammed Nato allies as “cowards” and urged them to secure the strait.

On Sunday, Japan said it could consider deploying its military for minesweeping in the strait of Hormuz, if a ceasefire is reached.

The foreign minister, Toshimitsu Motegi, said: “If there were to be a complete ceasefire, hypothetically speaking, then things like minesweeping could come up.

“This is purely hypothetical, but if a ceasefire were established and naval mines were creating an obstacle, then I think that would be something to consider,” Motegi said on Japanese TV.

Japan’s military actions are limited under its postwar pacifist constitution, but 2015 security legislation allows Japan to use its self-defence forces overseas if an attack, including on a close security partner, threatens Japan’s survival and no other means are available to address it.

Japan gets about 90% of its oil shipments via the strait, which Tehran has largely closed during the war, now in its fourth week"

With Reuters and Agence France-Presse

Trump tells Iran it has 48 hours to open Hormuz or US will ‘obliterate’ its power plants | Strait of Hormuz | The Guardian

The Supreme Court Could Make it Harder to Vote by Mail in the Midterms - The New York Times

The Supreme Court Could Make It Harder to Vote by Mail in the Midterms

"The Republican National Committee wants to toss ballots arriving after Election Day. Critics say thousands of votes — a majority cast by Democrats — are at stake.

March 22, 2026Updated 10:56 a.m. ET

The Supreme Court in Washington. Watson v. Republican National Committee will be the subject of oral arguments on Monday.Al Drago for The New York Times

A case about mail voting that will be the subject of oral arguments before the Supreme Court Monday in some ways boils down to a simple question. What is the definition of Election Day?

But the potential political consequences of the case, which was brought by allies of President Trump who want to bar states from counting mailed ballots that arrive after Election Day, are far more tangible.

Coming smack in the middle of this year’s hotly contested battle for control of Congress, the case could upend election rules in at least 18 states and territories, potentially disqualifying hundreds of thousands of mail ballots in upcoming contests that would be considered valid under current law.

The case, Watson v. Republican National Committee, stems from President Trump’s fixation with mail voting, and will test the effort of Mr. Trump and his allies to impose voting restrictions born out of his baseless claims of widespread fraud. There is scant evidence, for instance, for his claim that accepting ballots postmarked by Election Day but received afterward invites a flood of phony votes that sway results.

Whether the law allows for states to establish such grace periods is a more convoluted legal question.

Federal statute establishes Election Day as the “Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November.” Some say that means all votes must be in the hands of election officials by then; others say ballots must simply be cast and postmarked by that day.

Specifically, Watson v. R.N.C. challenges a Mississippi law that allows election officials to count ballots postmarked by Election Day but arriving up to five business days later. Mississippi is one of 14 states with such laws, though the length of the grace period varies. Similar laws are also on the books in the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Since the 2020 election, Mr. Trump has crusaded against mail voting, which exploded in popularity as a safe way to cast ballots during the pandemic.

Democrats flocked to mail voting in far greater numbers that year than Republicans, who were discouraged from using the practice by Mr. Trump’s sharp rhetoric. That in turn created an illusion on election night, when states typically tally in-person votes first, that Mr. Trump was ahead.

In fact, mail ballots took days and even weeks to tally in some states, and no evidence of widespread fraud emerged in any of the states where votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. caught up to and surpassed those for Mr. Trump. The phenomenon of the “red mirage” was born.

Mr. Trump claimed there was no mirage, and he and his allies have relentlessly continued to rail against mail voting. He has called for its end outright, and sought to place significant restrictions on the process through legislation, failed executive orders and numerous court cases.

“No more crooked mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military or travel,” Mr. Trump said during his State of the Union address last month. “None.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson joined the fray last month. “We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost,” Mr. Johnson said. “It looks on its face to be fraudulent. Can I prove that? No, because it happened so far upstream.”

Mr. Trump has been transparent about his belief that changing voting laws would benefit his party.

“We’ll never lose a race in 50 years,” he said during a speech in Georgia last month, referring to passing federal voting legislation currently being debated in the Senate. He also falsely claimed without evidence that Democrats “cheat” with mailed ballots.

Such candor about his political aims has prompted Democrats, voting rights groups and some election administrators to counter that his real goal is to tip the scales of voting rules to give Republicans an advantage, to make voting more difficult or to simply continue to sow doubt about election results.

“We see this as a constant effort to basically intrude into the election process, and for this administration to figure out ways that they can discourage people from going to vote,” said Shirley Webber, the Democratic secretary of state in California. She added: “I find it somewhat ironic” that Mr. Trump had cast ballots by mail himself in the past.

Historically, changing voting rules in the middle of an election year has caused significant voter confusion, and has long been discouraged by election administrators and voting-rights authorities within the Department of Justice.

It has also produced a Supreme Court doctrine known as the Purcell principle, which discourages courts from allowing such changes when voting is imminent. Opponents of the lawsuit may argue that the principle should deter justices from tossing late deadlines.

Even laws signed well ahead of an election can have an outsize impact. In Texas in 2022, critics blamed a new, Republican-backed law featuring rigorous identification requirements for the rejection of roughly 30 percent of absentee ballots in the state’s most populous counties. The law had been enacted six months earlier.

Concerns about delayed counts — which have only grown with the proliferation of mail voting — in some cases reach beyond partisan politics.

Republicans have argued that requiring all mail ballots to be in by Election Day would help alleviate delays in results. Some Democrats and voting-rights advocates agree that weekslong counts can undermine public confidence in elections. But they say the problem isn’t only late-arriving ballots; it’s the mountain of ballots that arrive before the close of polls.

Stuart Holmes, the election director in Washington State, said an estimated 50 percent of ballots statewide — which in 2024 numbered 2 million — are typically received the final week ahead of Election Day. Late-arriving ballots in the state in 2024, by contrast, totaled about 127,000.

On Election Day, ballot drop boxes are “plum full,” Mr. Holmes said. “So those aren’t going to get processed Election Day. And the day after that, we’re still doing all of our signature verification, post-Election Day audits — all of those things contribute to a delay in results.”

Before Mr. Trump arrived on the political scene, Republicans were once the party promoting and using mail voting. The practice helped catapult the party to political dominance in Florida. And a mail voting law in Georgia was endorsed by a Republican governor and passed by a Republican-controlled legislature.

The process is still popular among Republicans in some deeply red, and particularly rural, parts of the country — raising the prospect of political peril for Mr. Trump and the G.O.P. leaders pushing the Supreme Court to act. In Nevada, a key swing state during the 2024 election, the counties with the highest mail ballot turnout were Douglas County and Nye County, according to the secretary of state’s office. Both counties voted in favor of Mr. Trump by more than 30 percentage points.

Besides Mississippi, three states with complete Republican control — Texas, West Virginia and Alaska — currently allow for some form of late-arriving ballots.

The legal argument made by the Republican National Committee could potentially apply to all late-arriving ballots, including those from the military and overseas voters. Mr. Trump has publicly called for military personnel to continue being able to cast absentee ballots by mail.

And late-arriving ballots have benefited Republicans in the past. A brief filed in the case by the Elias Law Group, a Democratic-leaning firm focused on voting rights, argues that former President George W. Bush would have lost the 2000 election had a ban on late-arriving ballots for military members been in place.

Conservatives argue that it’s simply a case of following clearly established federal law.

“If they’re told you must get your ballot in the mail a week before the election in order to guarantee that it’ll get here in time, then that’s what they’re going to do,” said Jason Snead, who leads the conservative Honest Elections Project. “They’ll respond to those changes. And I don’t think that’s a particularly difficult thing to do.”

Calculating the impact of eliminating post-election ballot deadlines is a complex task. A review by the Times last year found that in 2024, at least 725,000 ballots were postmarked by Election Day and arrived within the legally accepted post-election window, according to election officials in 14 of the 22 states and territories where late-arriving ballots were accepted that year. Four of these states — Kansas, North Dakota, Ohio and Utah — have since changed their policies and will accept only mail ballots that arrive by Election Day.

Discerning political impact is even trickier, as Democrats still far outpace Republicans in their use of mail voting. In Virginia, 73 percent of ballots that arrived after Election Day and were counted in 2024 were cast for Vice President Kamala Harris, compared with just 23 percent for Donald J. Trump. But mail ballots that arrived before Election Day had almost the same partisan breakdown.

Regardless of how the court rules, many voting rights experts do not expect Mr. Trump’s obsession with mail voting to subside — especially if Republicans lose seats in the November elections.

Said Wendy Weiser, who directs the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center, a New York nonprofit: “I think it’s all part of an effort to delegitimize elections and mail voting so as to soften the ground for efforts to try to overturn or interfere in election.”

Nick Corasaniti is a Times reporter covering national politics, with a focus on voting and elections."

The Supreme Court Could Make it Harder to Vote by Mail in the Midterms - The New York Times