In one of Donald Trump’s many attempts to steal the 2020 election, the former president called on the Supreme Court to take up his cause and fraudulently overturn Joe Biden’s victory. Given that Trump, by appointing Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett, established the high court’s 6–3 conservative majority, he presumably hoped the bench would remain loyal to him. But after the court declined to take up cases seeking to invalidate election results in multiple states, Trump channeled his rage at Kavanaugh, according to Michael Wolff’s upcoming book, Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency.
“I’m very disappointed in Kavanaugh,” Trump remarked in an interview with Wolff, per an excerpt. “He just hasn’t had the courage you need to be a great justice.” Trump, who stood by Kavanaugh while the latter faced sexual-misconduct allegations during his confirmation process, added, “Where would [Kavanaugh] 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.”
Wolff also told Britain’s Channel 4 News this week that people close to Trump thought the former president was losing his mind. “Virtually everyone around Trump—we’re not talking Democrats here, we’re talking Trump aides, intimates, and supporters—everyone believes he has gone off his rocker,” Wolff said. “I mean, let’s not put too fine a point here: They believe he is crazy.” He continued: “At the same time, he commands a, if not a majority of the country, a very, very substantial minority comes to believe that this election is stolen and whose support for him ever hardens.”
Wolff’s promotional tour has been sweeping, with regular excerpts and interviews shedding light on what the author says are the inner workings of Trumpworld. And it has gone on parallel to another bout of press for a similar Trump book: Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig’s I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, which, along with a slew of upcoming releases, indicates our collective inability to look away from the train wreck that was the previous administration. In an excerpt from the latter, to be published on Tuesday, Rucker and Leonnig reported that, among other things, some in Trump’s circle were concerned about the drinking habits of Trump’s former personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani: “Some people thought Giuliani may have been drinking too much and suggested to [campaign manager Bill]Stepien that he go talk to the former New York mayor.”
A similar characterization has come from Wolff, who described the Trump-Giuliani relationship during a Tuesday appearance on CNN. “Within days of November 3rd, [Trump] is absolutely alone, and he is fighting this effort to overturn the election…which would be one of the biggest legal efforts in the history of American jurisprudence,” Wolff said. “It’s just him and Rudy Giuliani, who is—most of the time, frankly—drunk.” In Landslide, Trumpworld figures remark on Giuliani’s drinking. “Giuliani was, many around Trump believed, always buzzed if not, in the phrase Steve Bannon made famous in the Trump White House, hopelessly ‘in the mumble tank,’” writes Wolff, according to an excerpt published by Insider. (Giuliani’s longtime personal assistant did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.) “Many believed [Giuliani] had the beginnings of senility: focus issues, memory problems, simple logic failures. A vast disorganization of papers and files and tech malfunctions followed in his wake.”
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