Evergreen question: Does Donald Trump not know how government works or does he not care?

In truth, the answer is almost always a mix of the two. Trump’s campaign was a toxic mix of norm-breaking and ignorance, and there’s no reason to suspect that will cease when Trump moves into the White House. But here are two things that have happened in the last 12 hours that could cause enormous complications for the country for no real benefit whatsoever:

We’ll start with the lesser of these two evils, Trump pressuring Theresa May to appoint Nigel Farage as ambassador to the United States. For one thing—and this will be a theme—can you imagine the response if this was done in reverse and, say, May suggested that Trump appoint, I don’t know, Lenny Kravitz to be ambassador to Great Britain? Trump is interfering with the business of another sovereign nation so he can hang out with his buffoonish British counterpart. It shows a willingness to interfere without calculation or benefit, which could have drastic consequences if applied to something more serious than an ambassadorship.

As for the second thing—the Department of Justice does not operate this way. The attorney general sets the priorities for the DOJ, not the president—and the president certainly doesn’t tell the DOJ who to prosecute. In this instance, Trump could be changing precedent simply because he doesn’t know what the precedent is. (To be fair, presidents have interfered with the Justice Department before, just not so blatantly.)

And the medium is important: Why is Trump’s campaign manager divulging this information? If David Plouffe had told Morning Joe and Morning Mika that President Obama wasn’t going to jail any bankers, it would raise a host of alarms. This may not, but only because of the sheer volume of Trump scandals that are happening concurrently, two months before he’s set to begin his term as president.