“Well, why don’t we just get up to the Supreme Court directly?” he asked, according to the book. “Like, why can’t we just go there right away?”

The president’s advisors told him that there was a specific legal process to follow to get before the Supreme Court. Trump instructed them to go figure that process out, the book says.

What followed was what Woodward and Costa describe as a “tense, basic, law school 101 discussion” between the lawyers “about what they should tell Trump.”

“They knew they could never go straight to the Supreme Court,” the book says. “Trump would have to file in district courts, then get a federal appeals court to hear the case, then file for the Supreme Court. It would take time.”