That still leaves the difficult problem of who exactly should be allowed to run federal law enforcement and how to prevent that process from becoming corrupted by political influence. As is universally accepted among legal scholars the world over, the power to prosecute includes “prosecutorial discretion”—the power to decide whether and when to charge someone with a crime. And anyone familiar with the American legal system understands that the power to enforce federal law is vested in the president.

Barack Obama, for example, invented whole new ways of deploying prosecutorial discretion, discovering in it a dubious kind of lawmaking power. The goal of Obama’s executive amnesty for Dreamers may be laudable, but when he bragged, “I changed the law,” he inadvertently revealed a problem. The executive amnesty said, in effect, that the government would not prosecute certain violations of immigration law—prospectively. Leaving aside the president’s obligation to “see that the laws be faithfully executed,” this was tantamount to suspending the operation of federal immigration law with respect to whole categories of people.

Students of British history will remember that the king once had a similar power—the royal prerogative of suspension. It was eliminated by Parliament in 1689, after the Glorious Revolution, and the American Framers were careful to prevent anything like it from arising under the Constitution; hence, the power to veto a bill only upon its presentment to the president—not later, after its enactment into law. And Obama’s Dreamer orders are not the only examples. He also suspended the collection of the employer-mandate penalty under the Affordable Care Act—a statutory tax obligation. These were arguably real abuses of power, and set precedents that progressives should be thankful Trump has not availed himself of.

Trump clearly chafes at the restraints under which he has to operate, and has at times appeared slow to understand them. He appears to be in more or less constant need of senior figures such as his chief of staff, the White House counsel, and the attorney general warning him off this or that course of action. This is where his inexperience in office is most telling. Nobody who has not held federal office can imagine the minefield of legal and political hazards one has to walk through every day just to get one’s job done. But Trump does not appear to have an interest in altering the nature of the presidency or expanding executive power at the expense of Congress the way Obama did.

There is no need to impute corrupt motives to the president to see the problem that Trump’s inexperience poses for the administration of justice—particularly when you combine that inexperience with his perpetual sense of aggrieved justice. He seems to think that he has the right to say whatever he wants in his role as a celebrity as long as he doesn’t do anything inappropriate in his role as president. And Trump does routinely use—and sometimes abuse—the celebrity of his office, particularly to attack his political opponents and even members of his own administration.