As we approach the full-blown primary cycle, dozens of Democratic wannabes are, as expected, lining up to cast themselves as the quintessential anti-Trump candidate. But if Donald Trump’s persona is an all-you-can-eat buffet of political and personal depravity, the declining standards he’s wrought have emboldened some leading contenders to dabble at the salad bar when it suits them.

Take Joe Biden, who over the course of a long career has earned a reputation as an unfiltered centrist with a divine gift for human connection. In a steady drip of personal essays published over the past couple of weeks, the 76-year-old former vice president has been called out by several women for his handsy hyperfamiliarity, which has manifested in bizarre episodes of hair sniffing as well as unwanted nose-to-nose and forehead-to-forehead contact. Although Biden hasn’t yet officially announced he’s running in 2020, he remains the Democratic front-runner in polls—and just like No-Apologies Trump, he’s not backing down.

“I’m not sorry for anything that I have ever done,” he said on Friday while insisting, “I have never been disrespectful intentionally to a man or a woman.”

Then there’s Bernie Sanders, known for his impassioned speeches railing against the excesses of Wall Street but digging in his heels on the issue of his own finances, à la Tax-Secrets Trump. Despite repeatedly promising that he would release his tax returns ahead of the 2020 presidential primaries, the 77-year-old Vermont senator has continued to stall and make excuses compared to other candidates who have already released their tax information.

“Just because you want ’em today doesn’t mean we’re going to give ’em to you today,” Sanders told CNN’s Jake Tapper last week. He has now agreed to release them on Monday.

The two leading Democrats heading into 2020 may differ wildly from President Trump on matters of policy, but as paternalistic septuagenarians who came of age in the Kennedy era, they are demographically cut from the same rigid cloth. And they are both ripping a page out of Trump’s entitled-old-white-man playbook, embodying elements of his stubborn personality. Between Sanders’s tax-delay tactics—what exactly is he hiding?—and Biden’s dismissive sorry-not-sorry video followed by a Twitter spat with the president—why feed the trolls?—the past week has felt like a food fight at the old-folks home. And the race hasn’t even started.

If nothing else, living under the Trump administration for the past two and a half years has resulted in the overthrow of many truths we once thought to be self-evident. We’ve seen that it’s possible for a president to lie constantly, about issues both consequential and ridiculous, and get away with it. We’ve also seen that it’s possible for a president to weather massive scandals by deflecting and denying personal accountability without alienating his base. The two leading Democratic candidates seem to be digesting this new data and incorporating it into their algorithm for 2020.

One of Trump’s biggest, longest-running fabrications is that he’s living his life under an infinite audit, going so far as to speculate that the I.R.S. has targeted him for being a “strong Christian.” He has cited this audit situation as his prime excuse for being the first president in over 40 years to decline releasing his tax returns to the American public. At the same time, Trump has dangled his tax returns as a bargaining chip, promising a big reveal tied to the release of Obama’s birth certificate (2011), his decision to run for office (2014), and the publication of Hillary Clinton’s emails (2016), all to no avail. Last week, after the House Ways and Means Committee requested the past six years of Trump’s returns from the I.R.S., White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney acknowledged Trump’s lie, telling Fox News that “voters knew the president could have given his tax returns . . . and they elected him anyway, which is, of course, what drives the Democrats crazy.”