One of the core tenets of the conservative legal movement over the past half-century has been that presidents should have more power. The “unitary executive theory” developed by John Yoo, then an attorney in George W. Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel, holds that the president has nearly unlimited authority in the conduct of foreign policy, to the extent that he could legally order the testicles of a child to be crushed.

Naturally, Republican judges and justices always discover a sudden allergy to presidential power whenever a Democrat is occupying the White House; both Barack Obama and Joe Biden spent their entire terms getting their domestic agendas hamstrung by hyper-tendentious lawsuits and partisan hack rulings. Nevertheless, thanks in part to the conservative legal movement, the powers of the presidency have tended to grow over time. It was Obama, after all, who had several American citizens assassinated without trial.

Undoubtedly, the apex of right-wing “jurisprudence” on presidential power is the aptly named Trump v. United States, in which Chief Justice Roberts declared the president immune from criminal prosecution for “official acts,” which he defined very widely, and presumptively immune for unofficial ones. For my money, it is the worst Supreme Court decision in American history. As the dissent argued, “The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

Today, America is getting clubbed over the head with the reasons why monarchies are bad. Roberts turned the presidency into a kingship, and the first president to govern under this ruling has compressed a solid millennium or two of monarchical misrule into a mere ten months. One would think that even a casual viewer of Schoolhouse Rock! would understand this, but if there’s anything that characterizes Donald Trump’s second term, it is the need for remedial education.