It’s no excuse for Trump that he’s not a lawyer, and that, as conservative commentator Andrew C. McCarthy put it, Trump “frequently gets out over his skis when he discusses constitutional law” — that, indeed, he “mangles” it. Trump took a solemn oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. After his years in the job, he ought to know something about that document.

Particularly as a supposed “conservative,” Trump ought to know something about the relationship between the federal government and the states. For decades, if not centuries, conservatives — not just the conservative lawyers Trump seeks to put on the bench, but non-lawyers — have harped on the importance of the 10th Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” In our federal system, the states aren’t under Washington’s control, the way a corporate subsidiary might be owned by, say, the Trump Organization.