The Trumpiest part of this isn’t him turning on an ally after that ally failed to do him a favor, although that’s extremely Trumpy.

The Trumpiest part is that he said it to Michael Wolff, the author of “Fire and Fury,” known for defending his sloppy sourcing by saying things like, “If it rings true, it is true.” Wolff’s credibility is so thin that even devout anti-Trumpers have stayed away from promoting the more sensational claims in his new book about the election, “Landslide.”

So what was Trump doing sitting for interviews with him? Why hand Wolff an irresistible PR hook for the book, that he had interviewed the former president at length about the post-election period?

Is Trump incapable of turning down a request from someone who’s keenly interested in hearing him speak?

He told Wolff that his problems with Kavanaugh’s rulings are based on “more than just the election” but of course that’s not true. If SCOTUS had ruled in his favor on Texas’s election lawsuit seeking to toss out the results in certain swing states, with Kavanaugh in the majority, Trump would have happily tolerated any amount of disappointment from his nominee in other areas of jurisprudence. What sticks in his craw about Kavanaugh especially, more so than Gorsuch and Barrett, is that he went to the mat for Kav to get him through confirmation after Christine Blasey Ford surfaced. I’m sure he thinks all of his appointees “owe” him but Kavanaugh really owes him. He welshed on his debt by refusing to overturn the election and Trump will never forget it, even if he ends up coming through on overturning Roe v. Wade.

“Where would he be without me? I saved his life. He wouldn’t even be in a law firm. Who would have had him? Nobody. Totally disgraced. Only I saved him.”…

Recalling the brutal confirmation fight, Trump said: “Practically every senator called me … and said, ‘Cut him loose, sir, cut him loose. He’s killing us, Kavanaugh.’ … I said, ‘I can’t do that.'”

“I had plenty of time to pick somebody else,” Trump continued. “I went through that thing and fought like hell for Kavanaugh — and I saved his life, and I saved his career. At great expense to myself … okay? I fought for that guy and kept him.”…

“I can’t even believe what’s happening. I’m very disappointed in Kavanaugh. I just told you something I haven’t told a lot of people. In retrospect, he just hasn’t had the courage you need to be a great justice. I’m basing this on more than just the election.”

Trump put him on the Court and Kavanaugh declined to put him back in the presidency. It was supposed to be a quid pro quo. And you know how much Trump likes quid pro quos.

He’s right, by the way, that Kavanaugh wouldn’t be at a law firm if Trump had yanked his Supreme Court nomination. He’d be … a federal appellate judge on the D.C. Circuit, just like he was before he was nominated. That job has life tenure, as all federal judges have. It’s probably also the case that if Kavanaugh had been dumped, Trump would have replaced him with Amy Coney Barrett — who also voted against granting cert on Texas’s lawsuit last December. (McConnell would have pushed for Amul Thapar to succeed Kavanaugh but the base would have demanded Barrett for maximum lib-owning after the Dems who had just borked Trump’s first choice.) Even if it hadn’t been Barrett but someone else, that person almost certainly would have sided against Trump and Texas too.

Why? Because the lawsuit was smoldering garbage. I doubt even the Rudy Giulianis and Jenna Ellises whispering in Trump’s ear last winter gave him reason to believe the Texas suit would prevail. When Trump says Kavanaugh lacked “courage,” he means he lacked the courage to overturn an election out of partisan tribalism based on a laughably flimsy legal pretext.

The irony is that if he cared about any ruling other than the Texas complaint, which he doesn’t, he might have valid grounds to feel disappointed by Kavanaugh. Other righties do:

“So far, we have seen little from either Barrett or Kavanaugh to justify conservatives’ high hopes for them,” [Ben] Shapiro told Fox News.

“To be sure, they haven’t engaged in David Souter-type liberal rulings, or Anthony Kennedy-style vacillation. But they have been markedly unambitious in their judicial approaches, most obviously in Fulton, which should have presented a clear opportunity to overrule Employment Division v. Smith, and in their unwillingness to accept the Barronelle Stutzman case.”…

“The cases mentioned in the Newsweek piece provide early evidence that at best, Barrett and Kavanaugh are incrementalists rather than change agents,” Shapiro told Fox News. “Conservatives can only hope that that assessment turns out to be incorrect.”

I don’t think Trump cares a whit about Barrett and Kavanaugh declining to hear Stutzman’s appeal or to overrule Smith in their Fulton concurrence (although they didn’t rule it out in the future), but he might seize on those opportunistically in interviews simply to take revenge on them for their election ruling. It won’t much matter, though; both will be judged by the right as successes or failures depending upon which way they go when Roe finally comes squarely before them.

But Trump will never forgive either for the Texas case, even if they end up tossing Roe in the trash.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Wolff, repaying Trump’s generosity in agreeing to speak with him by questioning his sanity: “There is no logic to this. There was no plan. He is deranged. The guy can’t get from the beginning of the sentence to the end of a sentence. Everybody knows there was no election fraud, except Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani. It’s like they’re on some other planet.” For a guy who’s recited the lyrics to “The Snake” to his fans many times, Trump seems not to have absorbed the lesson with respect to Wolff.