The first sign of trouble came last week. Donald Trump, complaining about President Joe Biden’s retirement, argued by way of his social media platform that Democrats were “Unconstitutionally” nominating someone new for the party’s 2024 ballot.

On Tuesday, the Republican repeated the line, arguing that Democratic Party leaders “Unconstitutionally” took the incumbent’s candidacy away from him. (Why Trump capitalizes the word unnecessarily is unclear, though he’s long adopted his own idiosyncratic approach to grammatical rules.)

At his long, rambling Mar-a-Lago press conference, the GOP nominee returned to the subject, suggesting that Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 nomination is, you guessed it, “unconstitutional.” After claiming that Harris was secretly in league with a Democratic cabal that pushed Biden to end his candidacy — an assertion he made up out of whole cloth — Trump said:

“[T]he fact that you can get no votes, lose in the primary system — in other words, you had 14 or 15 people, she was the first one out — and that you can then be picked to run for president. It seems, seems to me actually unconstitutional.”

It’s difficult to say from a distance whether Trump was genuinely confused about recent events or was simply hoping to deceive the public, but he was combining events from two different election cycles. His argument, in effect, was that Harris shouldn’t be the Democratic nominee in 2024 because her 2020 candidacy fell far short, which is every bit as absurd as it seems.

But it was his use of the word “unconstitutional” that stood out.

Whether the former president realizes this or not, the U.S. Constitution is silent on the matter of party nomination processes.

Biden was free to retire voluntarily; he was free to endorse his vice president as his successor; Harris was free to seek her party’s nomination; and Democrats were free to choose her to lead the party’s ticket. Not only were these events in line with federal election law, the idea that the U.S. Constitution somehow prohibits the developments is ridiculous.

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Trump was nevertheless proud of the comments and promoted a video of his comments on his online platform.

Or put another way, instead of being embarrassed by talking about constitutional law in an incoherent way, the Republican seemed eager to flaunt his ignorance.

Making matters worse, there’s a larger pattern to consider. In 2019, Trump didn’t like the U.S. House’s impeachment process, so he labeled it “unconstitutional.” In 2023, Trump condemned automatic voter registration, so he labeled it “unconstitutional,” too.

Around the same time, the former president said court-imposed gag orders on criminal suspects were “unconstitutional,” and the FBI executing a court-approved search warrant at his glorified country club was “unconstitutional,” too.

What voters are confronting, in other words, is a politician who appears to have convinced himself that “unconstitutional” and “stuff that bothers me” are synonymous. They’re not.