The president, who some had thought, perhaps wishfully might have been moving toward acceptance, reverted to high and bitter dudgeon. This was betrayal by the three justices he had personally appointed: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. He reserved particular bile for Kavanaugh, whom, he now noted, he had not wanted to appoint in the first place. “There were so many others I could have appointed, and everyone wanted me to. 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.” It was another persistent theme: he resented that he had been forced to appoint strangers rather than people he knew he could have depended on; he was annoyed at Giuliani for repeatedly assuring him that their allies on the Court would carry the day, and he was now annoyed at all the people who had prevented him from appointing Giuliani to the Court.

Again, it was a stark split screen.

The Supreme Court’s decision was a cringing embarrassment—or, reasonably, ought to have been for any lawyer involved in it, the attorneys general of the various states, and, presumably, the 126 members of Congress—many with law degrees—who had signed on in support of it. The plaintiffs had no standing in bringing it, said the Court, as almost everyone who had weighed in on the issue had said it would say. The two conservative members who said they might have allowed it to go forward, Justices Alito and Thomas, said that, even so, they would ultimately have ruled against Trump and Texas. The media and the Democrats could not have been more vicious in their mockery of the legal stupidity here, with the conservative Court concurring.

It was simply not possible that so many people with a basic legal understanding would have held this position—except if they weren’t actually holding it. They seemed to take two leaps of logic. In the first, it was obviously ridiculous—ridiculous to anyone with any empirical reasoning capabilities, ridiculous to the various state AGs who had dragged their feet in support of it, ridiculous even to a deeply conservative Court. But, in the second step, it was necessary and productive to support Trump’s asinine and hopeless suit because Trump had mustered so much support among so many voters with no interest in or capacity for empirical reasoning, or, at least, who were preoccupied with other issues.