The framing arrived fast, and it is wrong in a specific, checkable way.
The First Circuit's July 25 order is being described as a 2-1 partisan split - two Biden appointees outvoting a Trump appointee. That describes part of the order. It does not describe the part about mail ballots.
Judge Joshua Dunlap, the Trump appointee, dissented as to section 2(a) and part of section 2(b) of Executive Order 14399 - the provisions concerning DHS citizenship lists. On section 3, the mail-ballot rule, he joined the majority [1].
On the ballot provision the panel was unanimous, 3-0.
What Dunlap wrote about it is more pointed than the majority needed him to be. Footnote 12: 'Because the Government and Intervenor States mount no substantive defense of Section 3, they have no other basis to demonstrate likelihood of success as to the injunction barring implementation of that provision' [1].
In the text he added that the government and intervenor states 'have failed to show a substantial likelihood of success' on their standing argument as to section 3, and that plaintiff states 'would suffer irreparable harm... if they were unable to timely comply with various mail-in ballot deadlines' [1].
A judge appointed by the president whose order is at issue, writing that his own side did not defend the provision.
There is a second thing in the order worth surfacing, because it was covered in the opposite direction. When the D.C. Circuit granted a stay on July 17 in NAACP v. USPS, that was reported as a big win for the administration [2]. The First Circuit's order notes what the win consisted of: 'The court did not provide its reasoning for those determinations' [1].
A stay without reasoning is a procedural pause, not a holding about who is right.
