A prominent biographer of President Donald Trump warned on Tuesday of a looming midterm "crisis," shortly after the Supreme Court delivered a major win to the president's challenge to mail-in voting.

Seth Abramson, an attorney and the author of three bestselling books on Trump and his legacy of corruption, posted on X that the prospect of the president meddling in the elections is not only likely — it is becoming more probable every day.

"Just on a lark, I set up an LLM task to estimate the likelihood of the midterms experiencing a significant legitimacy crisis," Abramson wrote. "When I set the task 9 days ago, the estimate based on major-media reports was 58 percent. An hour ago it was 68 percent. Today's lawless SCOTUS ruling raised it to 80 percent."

Many observers have forecast that Trump may attempt to challenge the midterm results or otherwise influence the outcome, and some have presumed that his efforts would largely be stymied by the courts, as the White House has lost thousands upon thousands of cases over the past 18 months. The Supreme Court's latest decision detracts from those expectations.

"A month ago I would've said it'll require a fake national emergency, bogus Insurrection Act invocation and tyrannical — localized — use of martial law for us to lose our democracy," Abramson continued. "I felt those things would indeed happen by early 2029. I now fear SCOTUS plans to hand him America."

In an emergency, unsigned opinion issued through the Court's emergency docket — often called the "shadow docket," where the justices act on urgent requests without full briefing, oral argument or signed opinions explaining their reasoning — the Supreme Court ruled that Trump can move forward with his executive order. According to the New York Times, the order "directed the U.S. Postal Service to help decide which voters should receive mail-in ballots. Under the executive order, the Department of Homeland Security will also create lists of U.S. citizens that the administration believes could be used to monitor voter rolls for noncitizens."

Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal under federal law, and studies of past elections have repeatedly found such cases to be vanishingly rare.

The decision did not rule on the legality of Trump's order, but it will allow the policy to proceed while its validity is challenged in lower courts. Whatever that outcome turns out to be, it will almost certainly be appealed to the Supreme Court. The litigation will now unfold against the calendar of the November 2026 midterms, when all 435 House seats and more than 30 Senate seats will be on the ballot.

"It's impossible for this lawyer to underscore how far from legitimate jurisprudence we are," Abramson warned. "If someone told me the zealots running our SCOTUS had been threatened with death or imprisonment if they didn't submit to Trump, I'd tell you they'd be acting no differently if it were so."

Trump has asserted that mail-in voting is insecure and should be ended almost entirely. The method is nonetheless deeply embedded in how Americans cast their ballots: more than 60 million voters returned mail ballots in 2020, when they made up roughly two in five votes nationwide, and eight states — among them Oregon, Washington, Hawaii and Nevada — now conduct their elections almost entirely by mail. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), responding to the Court's decision, noted: "Trump voted by mail eleven days ago. Apparently it's good enough for him, but he wants to take away your right to vote in the same way."

She added: "Trump's voter suppression order is about making it harder for Americans to hold him accountable – it is shameful that the Supreme Court is enabling it."