Those who tuned in to last week’s congressional testimony from Marie Yovanovitch, the ousted U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, heard an awkward phrase over and over again: that political appointees “serve at the pleasure of the president.” For most of those present, the idea that President Donald Trump can lawfully remove ambassadors and other top federal officials at will was a concession to legal and constitutional reality. For others, it was a justification all its own.

When Adam Schiff noted this, for example, one House Republican wrote on Twitter that the House Intelligence Committee chairman had been “forced to admit that the president can recall the ambassador,” as if that had ever been in dispute. Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel made the same dismissive point: “Last time I checked, ambassadors serve at the pleasure of the president.” So did the president himself. “It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors,” Trump wrote on Friday. “They call it ‘serving at the pleasure of the President.’”

The phrase is as old as the republic itself. But when Trump’s defenders invoke it these days, they aren’t using it to defend the president against allegations that he couldn’t use his powers. They instead cite the ability to do something to dismiss concerns that the president shouldn’t do something. In effect, Republicans are arguing not that Trump didn’t abuse his power in the Ukraine scandal, but that he can’t abuse his powers, no matter how he exercises them. Combine these views with other conservative arguments about the executive branch, and Trump and his supporters are effectively arguing for an elective monarchy.

This line of thinking flows from the top. When Trump is challenged on his actions, he often insists that he has the “absolute right” to do what he likes. He used the phrase in April to note that while he had never “ordered anyone to close our southern border,” he could do so if he wanted. Last June, he asserted that “numerous legal scholars” had concluded that he has “the absolute right to PARDON myself,” a dubious and anti-constitutional idea at best. And when he came under criticism for revealing classified information to Russian officials in 2017, Trump again took to Twitter to claim his “absolute right” to release that material to foreign powers.

Given this track record, it’s unsurprising that Trump has adopted the same all-or-nothing approach for the Ukraine saga. His supporters have whirled through a cavalcade of defenses over the past two months to explain why the president shouldn’t be impeached for inviting a foreign government to sabotage a domestic political rival. Trump doesn’t bother with the Olympic-level mental gymnastics shown by Fox News hosts and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham. He has said over and over again that his call with the Ukrainian president was “beautiful” and “perfect,” and that any doubters should simply “read the transcript.” (In it, he asks Volodymyr Zelenskiy for a “favor” and says Zelenskiy should investigate the Bidens.)