…with which I love to beat my liberal friends over the head, is that without Barack Obama, there’d have likely been no Donald Trump.

Not just in social terms – blue-state coastal elitism has been brewing a backlash since I was a kid (Lori Sturdevant’s mewling notwithstanding).

But in terms of presidents acting like kings?   For all the Democrat whining about Trump, he’s merely working within Obama’s precedents.

David Harsanyi:

Even if you substantively supported Obama’s actions — as I do on legalizing the children of immigrants who are in the country illegally, for instance — the reasoning that girded these supposedly temporary executive decisions was soon revealed to be abusive. In 2012, Obama told the nation that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which by any standard was a stand-in for legislation, was merely a “temporary stopgap measure.” By the time Trump overturned it, the measure represented “who we are as a people.” That’s because by “temporary,” Obama always meant “until Democrats can make it permanent through the courts or electoral victories.”

Even when implementing laws Congress had passed, Obama and his allies relied on coercing participation through mandates. And when it became inconvenient, they began arbitrarily implementing parts of laws. Administrative discretion became administrative abuse. When the president decided the Obamacare’s employer mandate was politically inconvenient, for example, he simply skipped it for expediency.

Democrats:  If you don’t like the way Trump is doing the presidency, you have only Obama to blame.