Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, two of he best legal analysts and Supreme Court observers, take a cold hard look at Chief Justice John Roberts’ newly revealed behavior in the big Trump cases last term and ruefully cop to being wrong about him. They discuss his seemingly centrist position in a number of important cases in which he found himself in the minority and his endless paeans to court legitimacy and conclude that he never really cared about the latter and just got tired of losing: Two years ago, in his solo Dobbs concurrence, Roberts faulted both the majority and the dissent for their “relentless freedom from doubt.” We can only guess that some time thereafter, he decided doubt was, in fact, for suckers, and embraced the aggressive activism of his colleagues to the right. We get it: Losing is no fun, and in the early days of the 6–3 court, when Roberts tried to find a middle ground, he sometimes faced the sting of defeat, and rebukes from his own party. His solution, we surmise, was not to take a principled stand of dissent when the far-right bloc went too far, too fast, but to join them and lead them to new heights of extremism. If you can’t beat them, it surely can be more enjoyable to join them, especially when any fears of breaking the republic can be washed away with your colleagues’ sweet, soothing sycophancy. The sycophancy they refer to are the private comments revealed from Gorsuch and…