President Donald Trump's furious reaction to losing at the Supreme Court shows he has trapped himself in an awkward political corner.
During a Tuesday episode of "Inside Trump's Head," longtime Trump biographer Michael Wolff said the president runs on conflict and is willing to cast even his own allies as enemies the moment they cross him.
"This is the thing that he always looks for. This is the conflict," Wolff said. "Today, the court is the enemy."
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected Trump's push to curb mail-in voting, which prompted the president to complain in a Truth Social post that the justices he nominated were "not the people I interviewed."
Trump nominated three members of the court's conservative majority, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh, and all three sided with the ruling against him. Only Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. The justices are "a shell of their original selves," Trump wrote in his lengthy Truth Social post.
"This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years," Trump wrote.
Wolff argued that Trump's outrage has nothing to do with the substance of the case.
"There is no logic here. The logic is only the conflict," Wolff said. "Who is my enemy? Let me vilify my enemy."
The loss puts Trump in a bind, Wolff said, because the justices who ruled against him are his own picks.
"He's in an awkward position here. These are the people he appointed," Wolff said, describing them as "the Federalist Society people" chosen for their conservative beliefs.
With those allies "turning against him," Wolff said, Trump's only move is to "come up with a rationale for why they are not the people I appointed."
Wolff said blaming the "radical left" for swaying three conservative justices was "extraordinary," but it fit Trump's strategy heading into the midterms.
"Repetition, repetition, repetition," Wolff said, describing how Trump plans to make the left his singular campaign issue.
"It's pathetic, of course. It's intellectually pathetic," Wolff said. "But from his point of view, this is what he's bringing to the MAGA core."