In a startling frank admission, President Donald Trump told reporters on Tuesday that he believes the country needs to have nine Supreme Court justices because of the millions of mail-in ballots at play in the 2020 election.

"We need nine justices. You need that," he said. "With the unsolicited millions of ballots that they're sending, it's a scam. It's a hoax. Everybody knows that. And the Democrats know it better than anybody else. So you're gonna need nine justices up there, they're going to be very important."

Critics of the president, including many here at AlterNet, have been arguing for months that Trump clearly sees his best chance at victory to be an early declaration that he's won on Election Night, challenging any mail-in ballots that might be breaking toward former Vice President Joe Biden in key states, and taking any legal fight to the Supreme Court stacked with conservative judges. With the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Trump now has the opportunity to install a sixth conservative justice, giving him an even better chance of having any election-related ruling break his way. And he also is using the very chaos and uncertainty he is fomenting around the election to justify the extremely rushed schedule the GOP has laid down for confirming a nominee.