This might have simply been another obvious Fox attack on the court’s liberal justices on behalf of the Trump administration. But Trump himself was watching Fox, as he often does. And he responded by using the segment as the impetus to try to stymie the possibility of the Supreme Court intervening in opposition to his administration.

Trump’s demand for Sotomayor and Ginsburg to recuse themselves from “all Trump, or Trump related, matters” should be seen as of apiece with his recent Fox-fueled efforts to corrupt the Justice Department. He and his hand-picked attorney general, William Barr, are using the DOJ to shield the president and his allies and to attack his political foes. The Supreme Court could act as a bulwark against the worst of the Trump administration’s assaults on the rule of law -- and so Trump is trying to take it off the board.

There’s virtually no chance Sotomayor and Ginsburg would recuse themselves. There is no mechanism to force justices to recuse themselves from cases, and they typically do so voluntarily only when they were involved with the case before it reached the court, when they have a financial stake with one of the parties, or when they have a familial tie to the case. Arch-conservative justice Clarence Thomas, for example, has not recused himself from Trump-related cases even though his wife, Ginny Thomas, is a conservative activist advising the president on personnel issues.

But by raising questions about whether the liberal justices should recuse themselves, Trump is laying the groundwork to respond to any future Supreme Court action against himself or his administration in which they play a role. He is setting himself up to be able to claim that the court’s orders are illegitimate -- and perhaps to refuse to follow them. All because he saw a Fox segment that primed him to carry out his worst instincts.