Donald Trump's nominee for a vacant seat on the US Supreme Court says he's "demoralized and disheartened" by the President's recent criticisms of the judiciary.
Judge Neil Gorsuch revealed his feelings about the President's attack on the courts during a visit to Capitol Hill on Wednesday.
He's due to face confirmation hearings soon in his quest to fill the Supreme Court's all-important 9th chair.
President Trump, meanwhile, has dismissed reports of Judge Gorsuch's comments as "fake news".
In his Washington Notebook, our US Correspondent Simon Marks takes a look at the President's playbook.
IN: "What's Donald Trump's…."
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What's Donald Trump's end-game? Or the end game of his gray cardinal Stephen Bannon?
What are they playing at?
Answering that question requires a considerable degree of speculation, but after three weeks of unprecedented tension and confrontation here it is a question here that also requires consideration.
So here goes.
Every single day since he took up residence at the White House (and it's hard to believe that was less than three weeks ago) Donald Trump has been chipping away at public confidence in two major institutions.
The first is the courts.
And remember, the US Constitution gives the Judiciary equal influence over government alongside the President and the Congress.
It's all part of a carefully calibrated system of checks and balances that America's founders wrote down in black-and-white in a bid to stop any kind of authoritarian from ever gaining too much power here.
Never before Donald Trump has a President publicly voiced such open disdain for the judicial system.
That's not opinion, it's fact.
Richard Nixon, the only President ever to resign the office, did what he could to undermine the judiciary as Watergate unfolded.
But even he never voiced the kind of ongoing, daily attacks that President Trump unleashes on the judges…..or as he called one of them who ruled against him, this "so-called judge".
The second institution in his cross-hairs is, of course, the media…..purveyors of what he insists is "fake news".
In what must surely rank as the most amazing television encounters of this young Presidency, Donald Trump's top aide Kellyanne Conway conceded on CNN this week that he lies.
She was relentlessly questioned by the network's Jake Tapper about a series of factually inaccurate statements the President has made, including an entirely specious claim that America's murder rate is at a 47 year high….and the media refuses to report it.
She didn't once push back against the claim that the President deliberately tells falsehoods.
She simply said they were outweighed by "the many things that he says that are true".
Of course this is the woman who recently claimed the White House now traffics in "alternative facts".
Now I used to live in Russia, so I'm more than familiar with a Presidential playbook that deliberately undermines public confidence in democratic institutions.
It's the one Vladimir Putin has used since he first walked into the Kremlin, hand-picked from obscurity by former President Boris Yeltsin.
And one of the things President Putin has also done is play fast-and-loose with the Russian constitution, amending the document in 2008 to suit his own personal political ambitions.
He's viewed the constitution as malleable….it's something that can be rewritten if the rules get in the way.
Now I can't tell you for certain that President Trump is heading down that path….or might at some point propose suspending the US constitution, for a brief moment you understand, just to give him the space he needs to govern.
But he's certainly laying the groundwork that he would need to lay if he was ever going to do it.
Dragging the courts through the mud….
Making sure the public's confidence in a free press is shaken….
And telling people that any indication that his own popularity is flagging is "fake news".
"One of the reasons I was elected" he said this week "is law and order and security"….and he accused the courts of getting in the way of that goal.
Will he one day suggest some kind of a workaround….a relaxation of the checks and balances at the heart of America's system of government?
If he ever does that, you'll be able to remember that you heard it here first.
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