Once upon a time, we were told that Donald Trump not being “ideological” (a gentler way of saying he didn’t have a conservative bone in his body) would be a blessing in disguise, because it supposedly meant he wouldn’t be beholden to constraints of dogma or imagination that kept so many conventional Republicans from avoiding past failures, finding fresh solutions to problems, or appealing to normally-elusive voting blocs. Things didn’t quite work out that way.

Now he wants to be president again, and it’s clear his experiences have done nothing to impress upon him a deeper appreciation for the things he doesn’t understand. Case in point: during yet another lapdog interview this week, the generally useless Glenn Beck broached the subject of one of Trump’s earliest abandonments of his tough campaign promises (albeit in the most pathetically charitable framing possible):

BECK: You said in 2016, you know, ‘lock her up.’ And then when you became president, you said, ‘We don’t do that in America.’ That’s just not the right thing to do. That’s what they’re doing. Do you regret not locking her up? And if you’re president again, will you lock people up?

TRUMP: Well, I’ll give you an example. The answer is you have no choice because they’re doing it to us. I always had such great respect for the office of the president and the presidency and but the office of the president. And I never hit Biden as hard as I could have. And then I heard he was trying to indict me and it was him that was doing it […] these are sick people. These are evil people.

Not “we can’t let them get away with their crimes and abuses of power.” Not “we have to restore one standard of justice in this country.” Not “we have to remind Democrats they’re not above the law.” No, we have to lock up Democrats simply “because they’re doing it to us.”

As should surprise absolutely nobody at this point, the man has no comprehension whatsoever of justice, constitutionalism, or the rule of law. His brain reduces such concepts to a sophomoric question of personal relationships and retribution—which, as we see here and saw countless times since he came down the escalator, translates to either doing the wrong thing or doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. They were bad to me, so why wouldn’t I be bad to them?

The point here is not some David French-style handwringing that a second Trump presidency would be an authoritarian assault on democratic norms (there probably won’t be a second Trump presidency, and the man’s too cripplingly incompetent to see any revenge fantasies through to completion). It’s that a man who doesn’t even have a high school civics-level understanding of American constitutional principles—and plainly feels no obligation to develop one—cannot help but feed perceptions to that effect, and perceptions that he simply isn’t qualified for a job like the presidency.

There’s a very good reason for that second one: because he isn’t. Far more important than any perception issue is the fact that Trump’s answer reinforces that he truly doesn’t understand why any of this is so serious or how to fix it. The rule of law for its own sake is something he simply doesn’t think or care deeply about; it’s just another backdrop for people’s love or hatred of him to be acted out against. It’s the reason why his administration was constant chaos, why he did nothing to reform the Justice Department or punish those who weaponized federal agencies during the Obama years, why those being jailed and prosecuted for supporting him seem barely worthy of his notice: because he doesn’t take any of it seriously.

If the past seven years weren’t enough to make Trump shape up by now, he’s never going to. The odds of him finally becoming the serious, focused statesman we need in a second term are even lower than Biden deciding tomorrow that he doesn’t want to stand before the Pearly Gates as a remorseless babykiller. Which should be a big deal to those of us who actually want to stop the “sick, evil people” from doing sick, evil things (especially those of us who style themselves as authorities on the Constitution and the law).

Because it turns out that proverbial bulls in China shops aren’t any good at dismantling Deep States. You actually do have to know how the system is supposed to work—and why—in order to recognize the ways it’s been corrupted, and how to clean it out. If Trump puts his hand on a Bible again and swears another oath to the Constitution without appreciating what its words mean, expect it to turn out the same way—more words, more chaos, and more scandal that will ultimately leave the “sick, evil people” still standing.