President Donald Trump tends to strike hardest at his friends and most loyal allies when events do not go his way, largely because they make the easiest targets, according to Michael Wolff, the president’s longtime biographer. Wolff, whose best-selling books on Trump’s White House include 2018’s Fire and Fury, has been among the most widely read chroniclers of the president’s inner circle. He argues the pattern will repeat after a punishing midterm result, when he expects an infuriated president to hunt for someone to carry the blame for his own mistakes.

“He would literally dissolve,” Wolff said of Trump. “It would be the existential event of his life. He cannot be a loser.”

“President Donald Trump’s post-midterm temper tantrum will hit loyalists in his inner circle hardest, his longtime biographer predicts,” the Daily Beast reports of Wolff’s “Inside Trump’s Head” podcast. “The president will not react kindly to the widely expected blue wave that polling shows will hit on Election Day.”

The polling assumption carries historical weight: since World War II, the party holding the White House has almost always lost House seats in midterm elections, with rare exceptions such as 1998 and 2002. With all 435 House seats and roughly a third of the Senate on the ballot, the outcome will determine control of Congress — and, with it, how much of a president’s agenda can clear Capitol Hill.

Wolff said Trump tends to regard allies, including U.S. allies abroad, as weak simply because they are comparatively kind to him. But, as U.S. allies have already learned, Trump likes to target the weak for abuse.

After the midterms, Wolff said the “puppeteer” president will surely look for someone to blame. In his view, Trump will hand some Republicans a “moment in the sun” before eventually “pulling the rug out from under them” as well.

“Blame is elemental to Trump,” Wolff said. “He is going to throw dirt on virtually anybody who is a Republican. And what he’s going to say about all of these people who might want to replace him is that you’re nothing without me.”

Wolff predicted that Trump and his Republican Party are likely headed for a trouncing, and that this makes a new Trump meltdown imminent.

“They will certainly lose the House. They may lose the Senate,” Wolff said. “Whatever happens there, it’s not going to be pretty, and there’s not going to be a real way to spin anything else, but we’ve done terribly in this election.”

According to Wolff, Trump is not the kind of man who acknowledges losses and changes tactics after a midterm beatdown. While past presidents such as Barack Obama and Clinton have taken bad midterms as a signal to change course, Wolff said Trump does not have that kind of introspection.

“They say, OK, yeah ... that went badly for us ... and we ... hear you. And then they … modify positions,” Wolff said of past administrations. Only Trump, he argued, is incapable of admitting defeat.

“And that’s actually one of the reasons he won’t be able to say, ‘OK, I hear you, and we’re going to adjust.’ Why? Because that would be an acknowledgment of losing. I mean, that would be actually listening to someone else,” Wolff concluded.

Whether the polling holds on Election Day, and how the president responds once the results are counted, will be the immediate markers by which Wolff’s forecast is judged.

The original report appears on Alternet.