He now stands on the verge of re-enacting the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon forced out his own attorney general and the next man in line in order to sack the special prosecutor investigating Watergate. Nixon’s willing executioner back in the October 1973 was the No. 3 man at Justice, the solicitor general Robert Bork. At the end of that fateful night, Nixon promised him the next seat on the Supreme Court. It worked out badly for all concerned — Nixon resigned anyway, and Bork’s actions were a major strike against him in his unsuccessful nomination to the court.

Where’s Mr. Trump’s Bork? Could it be the associate attorney general, Rachel Lee Brand, a former professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School and now the third-ranking Justice Department official? Would she want to carry the same weight under which Bork labored for all his life?