By the standards of Trump’s Twitter excesses, this might initially seem a minor kerfuffle, but it remains a revealing one. Like so many of his outbursts, it reveals something worse than his unsuitability for the office, because it reveals he doesn’t even know what he doesn’t know: namely, that casually attempting to interfere with an allied government’s appointment decisions puts him wildly out of line. And worse than even that, there is no suggestion or reason to believe he is interested in acquiring the knowledge required to perform the duties the American people have, in their wisdom, entrusted him with.

Alliances are founded upon shared interests but also upon something else — reliability. It is already apparent that the new U.S. administration will offer little but trouble to its allies, already all too obvious that it cannot be relied upon and that past norms will be treated as inconvenient obstacles of the sort with which Donald Trump will not put up. Normal behavior is for little people; big league people can do what they want. If they smash things while doing so, that’s not their fault, and it will fall to other people to clean up the mess. Doing so will even be good for them.

Trump’s apparent belief that he is entitled to recommend that Nigel Farage — more on him in a moment — should be appointed the United Kingdom’s ambassador to Washington might just be another example of Trumpian carelessness, but it also reveals the extent to which his unpredictability causes problems for even the United States’ closest allies. There’s a reason America’s allies wanted Hillary Clinton to win the election: Whatever her faults may be, you knew what you would get from her.