After spending four years cheering on Joe Biden as he repeatedly trampled constitutional boundaries, Democrats have suddenly discovered a passionate reverence for executive restraint – conveniently aimed at President Donald Trump’s lawful exercise of his authority.

Along with castigating Trump as an “authoritarian,” an increasingly common refrain among the liberal commentariat is that Trump should resist what they call “overreaches” of his authority because it supposedly sets the precedent for the next Democrat president to do the same thing.

A recent X post from New York Times columnist David French is representative of this dubious reasoning. “This man is governing as if his faction will never, ever lose power,” French writes of Trump. “Yet every power he unlocks for himself he unlocks for his opponents. He’s not ‘winning.’ He’s opening America to an unsustainable pattern of mutual destruction and vengeance.”

Likewise, another liberal commentator on CNN asked viewers, “well, what happens the next four years from now when a Democrat is in office? What happens when President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decides to use these same powers that the president has now expanded?”