On the merits, anyone who opposed Obama’s moves should oppose this one as well. The scale of the policy change is smaller, but the defiance of Congress is more overt; the legal foundation might be slightly firmer (as Jell-O is slightly firmer than a pudding) but the bad faith involved in the “emergency” claim is more extreme.

And in general, serious conservatives are opposing Trump. Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias recently snarked about right-wing pundits who got “overheated about ‘Caesarism’ and ‘caudillos’” in the Obama era, mentioning me and National Review editor Rich Lowry as examples. But Lowry has written sharply against the emergency declaration, and I’ll happily endorse his point: If Obama was abusing his powers, then clearly so is Trump.

But in terms of the general lure of presidential rule, the general declension of republican norms into imperial habits, I also think Trump’s caudillo act is substantially less dangerous than what his predecessors did.

Here I differ not only from liberals who misremember Obama as a punctilious norm-respecter, but also from those conservatives fretting that Trump is establishing a precedent for a future liberal president to impose a Green New Deal by fiat. Not that they won’t be so tempted — but I just can’t imagine anyone looking at the political train wreck of Trump’s unilateralism and seeing a precedent worth invoking.

For presidential power to meaningfully expand, it is not enough for a president to simply make a power grab. That grab needs to unite his party (ideally it would also divide the opposition), it needs to be cloaked in enough piety and deniability to find support from would-be referees, it needs to appear to be politically successful, and finally it needs to be ratified by the other branches of government, if only by their inaction.