The claim

A viral social media post claims President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court to remove California from the United States. The post spread across several platforms ahead of the November 3 midterm elections and drew hundreds of thousands of views, with many readers treating it as a genuine news report and others calling for a fact-check.

What actually happened

There is no record of any such request. No White House statement, presidential social media post, press conference transcript or court filing asks the Supreme Court to remove California from the union, and no credible news outlet has reported one. A step of that kind would have dominated national coverage; instead, the only documented Supreme Court action in this area was far narrower. On November 2, the Trump administration asked the court to force California to set aside mail-in ballots from about 20,000 registered voters whom federal officials alleged may not be citizens. The court rejected that emergency request, with no justice publicly dissenting, leaving California's existing ballot procedures in place on the eve of voting. That ballot dispute is the subject of our earlier report on the Supreme Court ruling on California ballots.

Why it spread

The claim took a real event and stretched it beyond recognition. The administration's genuine, last-minute ballot filing gave the satire a plausible hook: readers who had seen headlines about Trump and the Supreme Court and California in the same week could mistake a joke for a follow-up report. The timing mattered too. The post circulated as Americans headed to the polls in the midterm election that will decide control of Congress, when election-related claims travel fastest and are checked least. The underlying satire came from the Facebook page of Andy Borowitz, whose Borowitz Report is a satirical publication, not a news wire.

Our finding

The viral claim is false. The president did not ask the Supreme Court to remove California from the United States. What he did, through the Justice Department, was ask the court to set aside a limited set of disputed ballots, and the court declined. The removal claim is a satirical invention built on that real filing, and it should not be shared as fact. Readers can follow the verified election picture in our coverage of the final midterm push, where the ballot fight and the stakes for Congress are reported as they actually unfolded.