Trump once told me to ‘get rid of the judges’. His new defeat will make him reckless

When Donald Trump loses, he lashes out. And if the past few days are any indicator, his top advisers will be getting phone calls – like we did in his first term – demanding extreme measures. Only this time, he’ll have a more compliant audience. On Monday night, the US Supreme Court handed him a genuine defeat, rejecting his effort to restrict postal voting ahead of November’s midterm elections. This is not what Trump was expecting from a court that has repeatedly given him the benefit of the doubt. Even these justices told him he could not pluck ballots out of the mail. I can tell you what probably happened inside the White House late last night and this morning, because in that first term, I was on the receiving end. Shorts Moments like this one produced a particular kind of phone call. Late at night, Trump would dial up from the residence, angry about being boxed in and demanding increasingly absurd measures that tested the bounds of legality. I remember when he lost a major case in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and flew into a rage, summoning us to an urgent meeting and telling us he wanted to “get rid of the judges”. We had to tell him that a president cannot unilaterally abolish a federal appeals court without setting the US constitution on fire. Back then, I didn’t worry as much about an absurd demand like that being met. The people around him would slow-roll it, talk him back down or quietly let it die. This time, I know better. The officials who answer his calls today don’t say “no, sir” when he tells them to jump off a cliff; they just ask “how soon?” So today Trump will be working the phones again to the White House, Justice Department and Homeland Security (where I used to work), demanding the most extreme options for tilting the midterms in his party’s favour. I say this with confidence, partly because he has already told us. I was down in Texas last week for the Republican Party’s first-ever midterm convention. My presence alone was a sign of how badly it was already going for Trump. Dozens of his allies skipped town altogether (evidently worried about getting bogged down by his sagging brand), while avowed adversaries like me (he put me under federal investigation for “treason” for the crime of quitting his first administration and speaking out about his misconduct) gathered in droves. Trump greets Vice President JD Vance at the Republican National Committee midterm convention in Dallas. Many of the President’s other allies skipped town (Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP) On the final night of the Dallas event, he had the crowd raise their right hands and repeat after him: “I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do.” The audience laughed. Anyone who thinks he was joking doesn’t know Donald Trump. In my experience, the man road-tests his most extreme ideas as jokes. In the first term he “joked” about locking up his political opponents, then tried to set prosecutors on them. He “joked” about buying Greenland, then showed us he meant it. He “joked” that regulators should look into the comedians who mocked him and “joked” about sending US troops into American cities. Each time, the gag was a trial balloon. If the initial outrage didn’t generate lingering resistance, the joke became policy, and anyone who’d laughed it off the first time was made to look a fool. We should read his convention comment as a preview of his plans to cheat in the election, potentially with catastrophic consequences for democracy. He hasn’t exactly been subtle about where this is heading. Earlier this year, he urged congressional Republicans to “nationalise” the elections, causing jitters even in his own party; he sent the FBI to seize ballots in Georgia from the contested 2020 election, which he still paints that he won; and he signed the executive order at the centre of Monday’s court ruling, which would have let his administration track Americans’ mail-in ballots and given the government power to intercept the ones it deemed ineligible. Courts keep swatting down these efforts. The good news for Trump’s critics is that he’s suffering major political and legal setbacks. The bad news is that each loss makes him angrier, and anger has never once made him more cautious. Trump at in Palm Beach, Florida, during the 2022 midterms. This time around, he is fighting to save once blood-red Republican states (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty) You can see the panic in his travel schedule. This week, Trump and JD Vance are launching their midterm campaign swing, and they’re playing heavy defence. Vance is going to Kansas to rescue GOP Senator Roger Marshall, while Trump is venturing to North Carolina for Michael Whatley, who trails Democrat Roy Cooper by around eight points. These are states Republicans carried comfortably two years ago. When a GOP president is fighting to hold blood-red Kansas, it isn’t a good sign for the party. And when it’s someone like Trump, you know that he won’t take it well. Indeed, he’s almost always cooking up a dramatic way to strike back. The window for “October surprises” – sudden moves ahead of the vote – is open. Will Trump send ICE agents to polling places to intimidate voters? Will he defy the Supreme Court’s order and meddle with mail-in ballots anyway? Will he dispatch FBI agents to snatch votes in places where it looks like his candidates are losing? These are the types of outlandish demands I expect him to be making right now. I spent years watching this President absorb humiliation and somehow turn right back around and convert it into fresh recklessness. Last week, he got a partly empty arena. Last night, he got a legal smackdown of his latest election scheme. In the first term, when the phone rang after moments like these, Trump would recount his lawless fever dreams and bark immoral orders. But there were still people in the building willing to say “absolutely not” to the crazy idea on the other end of the line. The phone is ringing again, but this time I have no idea who’s left to refuse him.