Reuters has an exclusive:

In his first call as president with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump denounced a treaty that caps U.S. and Russian deployment of nuclear warheads as a bad deal for the United States, according to two U.S. officials and one former U.S. official with knowledge of the call.

When Putin raised the possibility of extending the 2010 treaty, known as New START, Trump paused to ask his aides in an aside what the treaty was, these sources said.

Trump then told Putin the treaty was one of several bad deals negotiated by the Obama administration, saying that New START favored Russia. Trump also talked about his own popularity, the sources said.

So that’s worrying. I know he’s made similar noises before, but now he can put them into action.

Two Democratic members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, senators Jeanne Shaheen and Edward J. Markey, criticized Trump for deriding what they called a key nuclear arms control accord.

“It’s impossible to overstate the negligence of the president of the United States not knowing basic facts about nuclear policy and arms control,” Shaheen said in a statement. “New START has unquestionably made our country safer, an opinion widely shared by national security experts on both sides of the aisle.”

Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, a Washington-based advocacy group, said: “Unfortunately, Mr. Trump appears to be clueless about the value of this key nuclear risk reduction treaty and the unique dangers of nuclear weapons.”

It didn’t help that he wasn’t briefed before he picked up the phone.

The phone call with Putin has added to concerns that Trump is not adequately prepared for discussions with foreign leaders.

Typically, before a telephone call with a foreign leader, a president receives a written in-depth briefing paper drafted by National Security Council staff after consultations with the relevant agencies, including the State Department, Pentagon and intelligence agencies, two former senior officials said.

Just before the call, the president also usually receives an oral “pre-briefing” from his national security adviser and top subject-matter aide, they said.

Trump did not receive a briefing from Russia experts with the NSC and intelligence agencies before the Putin call, two of the sources said. Reuters was unable to determine if Trump received a briefing from his national security adviser Michael Flynn.

I guess he doesn’t need briefings, because he understands things better than almost anyone. He says so himself.

Dan Rather on Trump’s outrageous attacks on a federal judge:

When James Robart, who was appointed by George W. Bush and approved for the bench by a 99-0 vote in the Senate, had the audacity to rule against the Trump Administration’s immigration ban, you knew a tweet was coming.

And the President lived up (or down) to expectations:
“The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!”

This reminded me of another statement from a former president who was previously considered our most autocratic and controversial, and who also swept to office on a populist wave – Andrew Jackson. When Chief Justice John Marshall ruled against him in a case involving Native American rights, President Jackson was quoted as quipping – “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” You can only imagine what Jackson would do on Twitter.

The reality is of course that our courts do not possess an army or law enforcement organization. They gain their power through our legal and democratic traditions. These are under attack. And this is deeply worrisome. Are we going to allow the very basis for our democracy to be threatened in this manner? Every one of us, regardless of political persuasion, must think hard on the answer to that question. Either we step up to defend our judges and courts from this type of intimidation or we do not. This is not the first time Donald Trump has lashed out in this manner and it won’t be the last. This is not a matter of policy but the future of our Constitutional form of government.

We have separation of powers for a reason. It is the bedrock of our nation. These attacks are unconscionable, intolerable, and we as a people are in the process of deciding whether or not they will be normalized.

That’s the issue, isn’t it. Like, I imagine, a lot of people, I didn’t realize how entirely unenforceable that separation of powers is. I did think people who said “checks and balances” would mean Trump couldn’t be all that terrible were being delusional, but I didn’t realize there was just nothing.

Yesterday Trump talked to a law enforcement conference in DC yesterday, and seized the opportunity to set the assembled law enforcement people straight about the law.

Trump kicked off his remarks by reading out loud the Immigration and Nationality Act, the law that gives the president authority to stop the flow of classes of aliens entering the U.S. The Trump administration has used that law as its legal standing for a controversial order temporarily banning all immigrants from seven Muslim-majority nations, a policy that created mass chaos at America’s airports and drew criticism even from some Republicans.

“It’s sad, I think it’s a sad day. I think our security is at risk today. And it will be at risk until such time as we are entitled and get what we are entitled to as citizens of this country,” Trump said. “It was done for the security of our nation. The security of our citizens. So that people come in who aren’t going to do us harm. And that’s why it was done. And it couldn’t have been written any more precisely. It’s not like, ‘Oh gee, we wish it were written better.’ It’s written beautifully.”

Whoa, go easy with the technical language there, dude, have a little compassion for us non-experts.

Despite the prior rulings against him, Trump argued Wednesday that the law is clearly and unequivocally in his favor. But his order could still be undone by constitutional concerns, which would supersede what is written in the statute, if courts find that Trump’s action was done for improper religious reasons or deprives individuals of legitimate rights without due process.

“You could be a lawyer, or you don’t have to be a lawyer. If you were a good student in high school or a bad student in high school, you can understand this, and it’s really incredible to me that we have a court case that’s going on so long,” Trump told his audience. “I was a good student. I understand things. I comprehend very well, OK? Better than, I think, almost anybody. And I want to tell you, I listened to a bunch of stuff last night on television that was disgraceful. It was disgraceful because what I just read to you is what we have. And it just can’t be written any plainer or better and for us to be going through this.”

Did you see it? I’ll play it again, with emphasis.

I was a good student. I understand things. I comprehend very well, OK? Better than, I think, almost anybody.

That’s one of those instant self-undermining things. Nobody who “understands things” would ever say that in a million years. Nobody. Nobody who had the most minimal understanding of how the world works would ever claim to have more cognitive firepower than “almost anybody.” Making that claim neatly demonstrates its own falsity.

And he doesn’t. He doesn’t comprehend anything.

He doesn’t understand, for instance, that the fact that he can understand the wording of a law does not mean that there is no room left for hearings and appeals. He doesn’t understand that that’s not how the law works. He doesn’t understand anything.

Dayum, they just don’t get it, do they – they are not allowed to use the office to flog their merchandise. That’s forbidden.

Yet Kellyanne Conway did just that, on television.

Conway, speaking to “Fox & Friends” viewers from the White House briefing room, was responding to boycotts of Ivanka Trumpmerchandise and Nordstrom’s discontinuation of stocking her clothing and shoe lines, which the retailer said was in response to low sales and which the president assailed as unfair.

“I’m going to give it a free commercial here,” Conway said of the president’s daughter’s merchandise brand. “Go buy it today.”

They’re setting a new benchmark for shameless public corruption. “Hi, I work for the president of the US, go buy his daughter’s dreck.”

Attorneys, including Campaign Legal Center general counsel Lawrence Noble, said Conway’s endorsement directly conflicted with OGE rules designed to separate government policy from private business dealings.

“I don’t see what their defense is,” said Noble, who is also former counsel for the Federal Election Commission.

“She did this on television. She was very clear it was advertising. Hopefully at the very least they will acknowledge this is wrong.”

Don W. Fox, former general counsel and former acting director of OGE, told The Washington Post that “Conway’s encouragement to buy Ivanka’s stuff would seem to be a clear violation of rules prohibiting misuse of public office for anyone’s private gain.”

He added: “This is jaw-dropping to me. This rule has been promulgated by the federal Office of Government Ethics as part of the Standards of Conduct for all executive branch employees and it applies to all members of the armed forces as well.”

But it’s a rule without enforcement, apparently. It seems we can say it violates rules all we like, but it seems that no one can stop them.

Enforcement measures are largely left to the head of the federal agency — in Conway’s case, the White House.

So that’s that then. The hen is cordially invited to send her complaints to the fox.

Amy Davidson at the New Yorker tells us that the core issue in the hearings on Trump’s ban is whether the courts or the people have any recourse when a president lies.

There was the ban, then the restraining order, then a request for an emergency stay of the restraining order.

The three judges on the appeals court—Michelle Friedland, Richard Clifton, and William Canby—wanted to know what, exactly, the emergency was.

As, I think, we all do. I for one want to know whether Trump even thinks there’s an emergency, or whether he simply thinks he needs to do something new and different rather the way a dog thinks this shrub needs a new spray of piss – to overlay and overrule the previous sprays of piss.

August Flentje, a special counsel to the Assistant Attorney General, who was arguing the case for the Trump Administration, said, in effect, that the emergency was that the restraining order got in the way of the President’s power to say that there was an emergency—to announce that the country was in danger. Putting a hold on the ban “overrides the President’s national-security judgment about the level of risk,” he said. It was the President’s job to make that determination, not any court’s.

And there’s your problem right there. The president in question has no judgment, about anything. He has no conception of the activity of judgment, or how it’s carried out. He doesn’t do judgment, and he so thoroughly doesn’t do judgment that he has no idea that he doesn’t do judgment – he has no idea that his thought processes are deficient in any way. He thinks all that’s required is speed and toughness. That, alas, is the opposite of judgment.

The judges had to believe the President when he said it was all a matter of the country being in immediate peril, and not about his views of any religion or about the demographic future of America. And they certainly shouldn’t pay attention to any reports that the President had, indeed, cited those very reasons for instituting a ban—Flentje dismissed those as “some newspaper articles.” The judges should just look at the language of the order and believe.

But how can they? Even if that’s normally best legal practice (I don’t know if it is or not), how can they do that with this specific president? When he’s visibly so reckless and uninformed and dishonest?

Judge Friedland pushed Flentje on the question of evidence – whether he had any, or really just expected the judges to close their eyes and Believe.

Flentje said that “numerous foreign individuals” had committed crimes since September 11, 2001, and that the President had determined that there were “deteriorating conditions in certain countries.” When he was asked if the government had pointed to any evidence connecting those particular countries to terrorism, he rejected the idea that it had to.

“The President had determined”=Trump pulled it out of his ass.

But there were immigration processes in place, Judge Clifton said. Where was the evidence “that there’s a real risk, or that circumstances have changed?”

“Well, the President determined that there was a real risk,” Flentje said. It was, he added, “understandable” that he had done so, because “the President understands” these matters.

But of course he doesn’t. He understands nothing. We can all see that, all the time.

Immigration law does give latitude to the President when the country is in danger. But what happens when you have a President who the courts, and any objective person, know tells lies? How should the assertions of danger then be regarded in light of other laws saying, for example, that religion should not be a reason for excluding people? For that matter, how should they be regarded in light of not only the Constitution’s Establishment Clause, which precludes religious tests, but any number of other passages in that document?

That, but also the additional problem – the fact that he knows nothing about it, and doesn’t even understand that he knows nothing about it. How can judges be expected to assent blindly to Trump’s claims about danger when we have seen him talk a pestilent combination of lies and ignorance on the subject for years? How can we take his word for it after his gruesome lies about the Central Park Five? His rants about carnage in Chicago? His lies about people in New Jersey celebrating 9/11? He may be so ignorant and mindless that he doesn’t realize he’s lying – he may think claims are true if he utters them.

This will be an ongoing problem.

Neil Gorsuch is not impressed by Trump’s repeated attacks on the judiciary over the past week. He had a meeting with Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Dem, today.

Trump on Wednesday morning declared that an appeals court’s hearing Tuesday night regarding his controversial immigration executive order was “disgraceful,” and that judges were more concerned about politics than following the law.

The remarks followed earlier tweets from Trump disparaging “the so-called judge” who issued a nationwide stop to his plan and saying the ruling “put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system.”

Blumenthal said Gorsuch, whom Trump nominated to the Supreme Court just over a week ago, agreed with him that the president’s language was out of line.

It would be pretty appalling if he didn’t.

“I told him how abhorrent Donald Trump’s invective and insults are towards the judiciary. And he said to me that he found them ‘disheartening’ and ‘demoralizing’ — his words,” Blumenthal said in an interview.

Gorsuch “stated very emotionally and strongly his belief in his fellow judges’ integrity and the principle of judicial independence,” he added. “And I made clear to him that that belief requires him to be stronger and more explicit, more public in his views.”

It does, sort of. If that’s what he thinks then he should say so publicly. We really don’t want Trump attacking the judicial branch.

The contretemps added another layer to the roiling nature of Trump’s young presidency. Some historians wondered if Supreme Court nominees had ever separated themselves in such a way from the president who nominated them; others tried to recall if a president had ever given a nominee reason to do so.

Well, Trump likes to break all the records.

Carrie Severino, chief counsel and policy director of the Judicial Crisis Network, a group promoting Gorsuch’s nomination, said the judge’s remarks simply confirmed what those close to Gorsuch already knew.

“He’s always been a person independent of the president, and it was shown by his statement,” she said.

Those on the left, meanwhile, said Gorsuch would need to do more than that.

“Is Gorsuch distancing himself from Trump? As we say on the Internet: LOL,” Drew Courtney of People for the American Way said in a statement. “To be clear: Donald Trump’s pattern of attacks on federal judges is more than demoralizing — it’s a threat to the separation of powers and our constitutional system, and it’s hard to imagine a more tepid response than to call them ‘disheartening.’ ”

You mean because Trump isn’t just some talking head, but someone with the power to actually weaken the judicial branch? Fair point.

Speaking Wednesday at the Major Cities Chiefs Association Winter Conference in Washington, Trump said he listened to the oral arguments at the appeals court and was disappointed at what he heard.

“I don’t ever want to call a court biased, so I won’t call it biased,” Trump told the group. “But courts seem to be so political, and it would be so great for our justice system if they would be able to read a statement and do what’s right.”

Trump said the arguments were “disgraceful” because his executive order “can’t be written any plainer or better and for us to be going through this” — he paused to mention that a judge in Boston had ruled to allow the order to continue.

In other words he babbled and veered off the point the way he usually does.

Trump said the courts were standing in the way of what he was elected to do and that even “a bad student in high school student” would support his policies.

“We want security,” he said. “One of the reasons I was elected was because of law and order and security. It’s one of the reasons I was elected … And they’re taking away our weapons, one by one. That’s what they’re doing. And you know it and I know it.”

And fluoride. And ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children’s ice cream. And you know it and I know it. Bad! Nordstrom. Emails. Alec Baldwin. Carnage. Bathrobe. Melissa McCarthy. Judges. Weapons. Pouring in. It’s a disassster. I don’t have my glasses, the writing is very small.

Trump’s comments were the latest escalation in a worsening dispute between the executive branch and the judiciary that the president has personally carried out on social media and in public remarks. While it is not new for a president to disagree with the actions of another branch of government, Trump’s crusade against the federal judiciary comes before the legal process has fully played out and is unusual for its threatening tone and use of personal invective.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Wednesday that the president is expressing his frustration with a process that he believes should be subject to common sense.

“He respects the judiciary,” Spicer said. “It’s hard for him and for a lot of people to understand how something so clear in the law can be so misinterpreted.”

And you know what? That’s his problem right there. He’s ignorant as pig shit, and he’s having hourly public tantrums because he doesn’t like it that the law is not as simplistic as he thinks it should be. Well tough shit. If he knew anything at all about it he would already know the law is not just “common sense.” Of course a lot of people think the law should be “subject to common sense” but they’re not the god damn president, are they. He is. He has a responsibility to understand how all this works. It’s truly contemptible that he’s whining because It’s Not That Simple. Of course it’s not!

But he’s a narcissist. He’ll never learn anything.

Another Donnie tweet, from later today. He seems to have…ah…missed the implications of the photo that goes with his link. He also left off a crucial word in the NBC headline.

'Majority in Leading EU Nations Support Trump-Style Travel Ban'
Poll of more than 10,000 people in 10 countries…https://t.co/KWsIWhtC9o

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 8, 2017

It appears that Trump really can’t read – not just that he doesn’t like to, but that he can’t.

It’s a pity he didn’t realize that makes him unable to do the job properly.

Donnie from Queens tweeted four hours ago (so late morning in DC):

My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person — always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 8, 2017

Yeah that’s a good look – the president of the US attacking a private company for not marketing his daughter’s merch to his liking.

But wait, there’s more. There’s worse.

The POTUS account retweeted it.

So it’s not just Donnie from Queens saying it, it’s the president of the US saying it, in his official role as president of the US.

Josh Voorhees at Slate says Trump may have just provided Nordstrom with the necessary standing to sue him for his grotesque ethics violations.

What little pretense remained that Donald Trump would not use his position as president to help his children is now officially gone:

My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person — always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!

That message was then retweeted by the official @POTUS account operated by the White House communications team, giving Trump’s attack on the department store—one that can also be read as warning shot to any other company weighing whether to end its business relationship with his family—the imprimatur of the federal government. That, to use the president’s preferred language, is bad!

“Can be read” is putting it delicately. “Cannot help but be read” is how I would put it – it’s a “nice little place you got here” coming from the head of state, not in a whisper behind closed doors but in a bellow on social media.

Ethics watchdogs who have long warned of the potential conflicts posed by the Trump family’s business interests were quick to cry foul on Wednesday. Importantly, they also saw it as a potential new opening to take Trump to court.

Currently, the most high-profile legal challenge to Donald Trump’s business empire concerns what is known as the Emoluments Clause in the U.S. Constitution, which bars U.S. officials from accepting payments from foreign governments. While many ethics experts agree that Trump is violating that law by accepting money from foreign diplomats who stay at his hotels and from state-run companies that lease office space in buildings he owns, the lawsuit ultimately faces a separate challenge: the question of standing.

In order to sue someone, plaintiffs generally need to prove that they were specifically harmed by the alleged wrongdoing in question. It is unclear, however, if the group behind the Emoluments suit—the ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW—will be able to check that box. The organization claims that since its mission is to investigate corruption, Trump’s actions represent a drain on resources that would otherwise be spent investigating the group’s usual areas of interest, such as campaign finance. There’s some precedent to support such a claim but not a lot, and courts tend to be skeptical of such broad assertions of standing outside of the context of civil rights violations.

Which means that our much boasted-of “checks and balances” don’t work worth shit.

Trump’s Nordstrom tweet might be a different story, though. Norm Eisen, who served as the chief ethics lawyer for the Obama White House and who is working with CREW, suggested on Twitter that Trump’s comments gave Nordstrom standing to sue him under unfair competition laws, particularly California’s state law, which protects against any business practice deemed “unfair,” “unlawful” or “fraudulent.” While the president is generally shielded from lawsuits over his official conduct while in office, that blanket protection does not apply to his private or business conduct. Nordstrom, however, would need to be able to show it was harmed economically. More immediately, though, the company would have to decide if it’s worth the risk of further angering a president who has yet again made it clear that he’s willing to single out specific companies that dare cross him.

I look forward to seeing billboards on the south lawn.

The Times editorialists are blunt about the disgustingly sleazy plans of Melania Trump to use Donnie’s presidency as a money-attracting tool.

[A]ny veneer of plausible deniability about the Trump family’s greed and their transactional view of the most powerful job in the world was shattered this week by a defamation lawsuit the first lady, Melania Trump, filed…

…As a result of the report published in August, Mrs. Trump contends in the suit, her “brand has lost significant value, and major business opportunities that were otherwise available to her have been lost and/or substantially impacted.” The suit offers no specific examples of lost business opportunities.

The timing of the story was particularly injurious, according to the lawsuit, considering that Mrs. Trump “had the unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as an extremely famous and well-known person, as well as a former professional model and brand spokesperson, and successful businesswoman, to launch a broad-based commercial brand in multiple product categories, each of which could have garnered multimillion-dollar business relationships for a multiyear term during which plaintiff is one of the most photographed women in the world.”

There’s really not much need to comment on that, is there – it speaks for itself.

People who know Trump say he won’t read anything that’s not about him – so it’s hopeless trying to get him to read, say, the Constitution, or intelligence briefings, or books about foreign policy or law or human rights or economics or history or anything else of that kind. But there are apparently a few exceptions, and one of them is InfoWars. That appears to be where he got his claim that news outlets are deliberately not reporting Islamist violence.

the kernel of the idea appears to have come from — or at least been propagated by — one of his favorite news sources: the conspiracy theory website InfoWars.

As @UrbanAchievr noted after Trump’s comments, InfoWars has been barking up this tree for a while now. A sampling of its headlines:

• “FAKE NEWS: MAINSTREAM MEDIA WHITEWASHES ISLAMIC TERROR IN BERLIN: Propagandists desperate to hide the obvious” — Dec. 20
• “SCANDAL: MASS MEDIA COVERS UP TERRORISM TO PROTECT ISLAM” — July 29
• “GERMANY COVERING UP TERROR PLOTS TO PROTECT MUSLIM MIGRANTS” — June 24

And so on.

Former congressman Allen West (R-Fla.) has also pushed this idea, posting a video from InfoWars back in August under the headline, “TERROR ATTACK: Massive media cover-up.” And it’s a theme that has cropped up on other conspiracy theory and right-wing websites from time to time.

The idea of the media covering up or not fully covering terrorist attacks was around before InfoWars picked it up, though. Conservatives have long accused the media of obscuring the details and motivations of radical Islamic terrorists in an effort to downplay the role of religion.

I think there’s a little bit of truth in that – I think many in the media are cautious about how they word their reporting because they don’t want to set off attacks on Muslims as a group. That’s not a bad or sinister motivation.

This caution also prompts some editorialists to avoid discussion of Islamism as an ideology. I do think that’s a big mistake, however decent the motivations.

But that’s not the same as not reporting, and it’s just obviously not the case that Everything Is Being Hidden.

And the idea that Trump got this from InfoWars is hardly far-fetched. Many of Trump’s conspiracy theories originate or at least involve InfoWars. And Trump has made no apologies for tying himself to the website and its founder, Alex Jones. In December 2015 — in the thick of his GOP primary campaign — Trump actually appeared on Jones’s show.

“Your reputation’s amazing,” Trump told Jones on his show. “I will not let you down. You will be very, very impressed, I hope, and we’ll be speaking a lot. … A year into office, you’ll be saying, ‘Wow, I remember that interview. He said he was going to do it, and he did a great job.'”

InfoWars has helped propagate the baseless theory that millions of people illegally voted, depriving Trump of a popular-vote win. It was a major player in pushing the birther conspiracy. It was an early player in the “Hillary for Prison” game, having started selling t-shirts bearing the slogan in the fall of 2015. And it has pushed the baseless idea that Muslims cheered in the streets on 9/11.

All of these have also been embraced by Trump, and now it appears we can add one more to the list.

It’s ok, though, because he will bring millions of jobs to small towns in West Virginia. You watch.

Now Trump is accusing the news media of concealing Islamist attacks.

Speaking to the U.S. Central Command on Monday, President Trump went off his prepared remarks to make a truly stunning claim: The media was intentionally covering up reports of terrorist attacks.

“You’ve seen what happened in Paris, and Nice. All over Europe, it’s happening,” he said to the assembled military leaders. “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”

What reasons? A secret hope to see Sharia become the law of the land?

It’s true, Philip Bump points out, that not ever terrorist attack gets extensive coverage – because the news media can’t cover everything that happens, so they select. But hey, guess what – Trump himself ignored a terrorist attack just last week. It was an attack not all that far away, too – the one in Quebec – the attack on Muslims as opposed to by Islamists.

Trump has consistently seen attacks like that in Quebec — committed by a young man who espoused anti-Muslim politics and defended Trump online — as isolated incidents from mentally disturbed individuals, while attacks by Muslims are part of a broader pattern spurred by radical Islamism. He sees an institution behind attacks by Muslims that he doesn’t see behind attacks like that in Quebec or in Charleston in 2015. That helps explain why he is willing to focus the country’s anti-terrorism efforts solely on terrorism committed in the name of Islam: He doesn’t see how other threats are systemic.

Or to put it another way, he doesn’t see how other threats are rooted in poisonous ideas. I suppose that could be because he shares the poisonous ideas.

Even John Yoo, author of torture-approving memos in Bush’s Justice Department, thinks Trump is overstepping the limits on what presidents can do.

Article II of the Constitution vests the president with “the executive power,” but does not define it. Most of the Constitution instead limits that power, as with the president’s duty “to take care that the laws are faithfully executed,” or divides that power with Congress, as with making treaties or appointing Supreme Court justices.

Hamilton argued that good government and “energy in the executive” went hand in hand. In The Federalist No. 70, he wrote that the framers, to encourage “decision, activity, secrecy and dispatch,” entrusted the executive power in a unified branch headed by a single person, the president.

Woo considers himself a Hamiltonian.

But even I have grave concerns about Mr. Trump’s uses of presidential power.

During the campaign, Mr. Trump gave little sign that he understood the constitutional roles of the three branches, as when he promised to appoint justices to the Supreme Court who would investigate Hillary Clinton. (Judge Neil M. Gorsuch will not see this as part of his job description.) In his Inaugural Address, Mr. Trump did not acknowledge that his highest responsibility, as demanded by his oath of office, is to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.” Instead, he declared his duty to represent the wishes of the people and end “American carnage,” seemingly without any constitutional restraint.

While my robust vision of the presidency supports some of Mr. Trump’s early executive acts — presidents have the power to terminate international agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, for example — others are more dubious. Take his order to build a wall along the border with Mexico, and his suggestion that he will tax Mexican imports or currency transfers to pay for it. The president has no constitutional authority over border control, which the Supreme Court has long found rests in the hands of Congress. Under Article I of the Constitution, only Congress can fund the construction of a wall, a fence or even a walking path along the border. And the president cannot slap a tax or tariff on Mexican imports without Congress.

Well…if he can’t, maybe one of his helpers can? Steve Bannon for instance?

Nor can Mr. Trump pull the United States out of Nafta, because Congress made the deal with Mexico and Canada by statute. Presidents have no authority to cancel tariff and trade laws unilaterally.

Immigration has driven Mr. Trump even deeper into the constitutional thickets. Even though his executive order halting immigration from seven Muslim nations makes for bad policy, I believe it falls within the law. But after the order was issued, his adviser Rudolph Giuliani disclosed that Mr. Trump had initially asked for “a Muslim ban,” which would most likely violate the Constitution’s protection for freedom of religion or its prohibition on the state establishment of religion, or both — no mean feat. Had Mr. Trump taken advantage of the resources of the executive branch as a whole, not just a few White House advisers, he would not have rushed out an ill-conceived policy made vulnerable to judicial challenge.

But where’s the fun in that? Trump wants the fun he imagines goes with the job. He couldn’t care less what the Constitution says…despite having sworn that oath.

A successful president need not have a degree in constitutional law. But he should understand the Constitution’s grant of executive power.

He should at least have read the damn thing. I strongly doubt that Trump ever has.