President Trump lies so reflexively on trivial matters that world leaders do not know whether to believe him on important ones. This conduct has become so routine it barely merits notice. He denounces the press as “the enemy of the people,” derides his critics as treasonous and openly fawns over an autocrat whose modern-day gulags practice extermination, torture and sexual violence. The president’s most strenuous apologists have long swept all this away with the breezy assurance that he should be taken “seriously, not literally.” Instead of his bombast, they say, look to policies of which conservatives approve.

This image of Mr. Trump as a political Robin Hood whose illicit behavior is justified because it serves a greater good is doubly flawed. First, the lying and vulgarity are unrelated to the policies Mr. Trump’s base wants implemented. Second, his supporters purport to seek a restoration of American founding principles. This increasingly strains credulity. But if they profess constitutionalism, they should at least understand that it is more about process than policy. Constitutions depend on habits and traditions, not the momentary outcomes they produce. Mr. Trump’s upending of these customs, not his transient policies, will form the legacy that endures.

The first flaw arises from what might be called the “post Trump, ergo propter Trump” fallacy. It is a form of the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” error in logic: “after, therefore because of.” The classic illustration is the supposition that the rooster’s crow causes the sunrise because the second event follows the first.

In the version of the fallacy his defenders espouse, Mr. Trump violates customary standards of presidential behavior and then delivers desired policies, so the assumption is that the violations produced the policies. No one believes this more vehemently than Mr. Trump himself, a man who crows before the stock market rises and believes he caused it to occur. The challenge in his case is that the boorishness that supposedly yields conservative outcomes is so unrelenting it is impossible to correlate with anything and plausible to associate with everything.

Edmund Burke would recognize the error Mr. Trump’s base makes. He noted similarly flawed logic in the French Revolution. By destroying all political institutions, Burke wrote, the French revolutionaries had doubtless done away with some bad ones. By starting everything anew, they had inevitably done some good. But to credit their successes or excuse their crimes, it was necessary to show “that the same things could not have been accomplished without producing such a revolution.”

Mr. Trump’s defenders are in largely the same position: To excuse his trampling of norms, they must demonstrate that he could not have achieved his policy agenda without doing so. Yet there is no obvious connection between serial dissembling and the success of a policy agenda. Mr. Trump need not behave uncivilly to nominate originalist judges. He can advocate a reassessment of the nation’s foreign commitments without sacrificing the dignity of his office.

In fact, Mr. Trump would be better positioned to accomplish these things if he observed rather than overran norms, which would curb his most self-destructive impulses. It is difficult to negotiate a domestic agenda with someone who lies not just about his poll numbers but also about whether the polls even exist. Foreign leaders are less likely to strike agreements with a head of state for whom words are fungible. The country’s invaluable moral authority abroad is undermined when the president attacks the press at home.

There are already indications that Mr. Trump’s bombast will not leave the political scene when he does. At their debates last Wednesday and Thursday, many Democrats pledged to prosecute Mr. Trump if they are elected, which is hard to distinguish from his politicization of law enforcement.

All this is not wholly attributable to Mr. Trump. He is hardly the first occupant of his office either to deceive routinely or to behave crudely. In addition, it is defensible to regard Mr. Trump as better than available alternatives without endorsing his conduct. But there is a point at which style overwhelms substance. Mr. Trump’s staunchest defenders are uniquely bold in the extent to which they justify any means to favored ends. His evangelical Christian supporters, for example, are willing not merely to excuse Mr. Trump’s adultery and deceit but also to embrace them: The more vulgar he is, the more he fulfills his supposedly divine mission.

Yet many of the same supporters claim to seek a constitutional revival. In particular, they believe that the judges he has named atone for every other presidential sin. It is true that these judges will shape constitutional interpretation for decades. But constitutions depend far more on traditions of voluntary adherence than on judicial decree.

If constitutionalism teaches anything, it is to trust laws over individuals and processes over outcomes. One reason is that power placed in an ally’s hands will inevitably be available to an adversary. Another is the fleeting nature of policy as opposed to the lasting need for constitutional traditions. Judges come and go, even if life tenure places them on a long clock. Taxes rise and fall even more quickly. In Mr. Trump’s case, the legacy of bulldozed norms will outlast the policies.

If self-proclaimed constitutionalists are actually willing to exchange enduring habits for transient policies, they should at least be sure the means are necessary to the ends. There is nothing Mr. Trump has achieved to which his incivility has been indispensable or even useful. The gratuitous nature of his unpresidential behavior adds an element of farce to the tragic bargain many of Mr. Trump’s apologists have struck.

Greg Weiner (@GregWeiner1) is a political scientist at Assumption College and the author, most recently, of “Old Whigs: Burke, Lincoln and the Politics of Prudence.”

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