The anti-Trump progressive left — at least as embodied in the legacy media — is fairly predictable.  

A few weeks ago, they were telling us how Donald Trump was a fascist Nazi sympathizer.  A few weeks from now, they will be clamoring for his removal under the 25th Amendment. 

In the meantime, outlet after outlet, from CNN to Politico to NPR and beyond, has decided to weigh in on the team Trump is putting together. 

And they all seem very, very interested in whether or not he will hire “adults,” as they put it — or whether he will seek to pursue his evil autocratic intentions by hiring a bunch of . . . gasp . . . “loyalists.”

That’s a fascinating word, “loyalist.” It seems to have a lot of flexibility. 

If you like the president, it means something like “a dedicated public servant who will endeavor to help the duly elected leader of the nation accomplish the agenda that the people voted for.”  

If you don’t like the president, it means “a toady fascist bent on dismantling democracy and installing a dictatorship.”

So you can understand the outrage at the heart of most of the media chatter about Trump “hiring loyalists.”

Let’s be clear: Every president, every single one, without exception, seeks to hire loyalists. 

Yes, you can pine for the golden age of yore and Lincoln’s vaunted “Team of Rivals,” but face it: Bill Clinton hired loyalists, as did George Bush, as did Barack Obama.  

Or you can long for the John Boltons of the world who claim (falsely) to have frustrated the worst of Trump’s passions the first time around.

But you are living in a fantasy world if you think a president would seek to add guardrails to his own administration.

Only a child, or possibly the editorial board of The New York Times, would think Eric Holder, for example, wasn’t an absolute loyalist for Obama.

Cabinet members, and indeed every single one of the roughly 4,000 jobs that any president is charged with filling in an administration, are supposed to be loyalists.

Those people are nothing more than extensions of the person sitting in the Oval Office. 

To be certain, they aren’t automatons: They bring with them their own experiences, expertise and abilities. But all those qualifications are expected to be used toward the end of executing the president’s agenda. 

Those people are not supposed to be “guardrails.” That isn’t their job. 

Yes, there is one position, chief of staff, who essentially gets paid to tell the president things he doesn’t want to hear.  

But if a chief of staff (or any staffer) assumes the extra-constitutional role of a check against the president, he is doing nothing more than frustrating the will of the electorate. 

The chief of staff isn’t — no administration position is intended to be — what the left so desperately wants right now: Someone who will prevent Trump from doing what he said he would do when the people elected him.  

For that reason, expecting a Trump Cabinet to be a check on a Trump presidency is, at its root, undemocratic.  

The progressives’ demand for “guardrails” on Trump are, in a way, a continuation of their nearly complete abandonment of the constitutional system of government.  

Can’t get your far-left agenda approved by the legislature? Try to leverage the courts into giving you what validly elected officials won’t.  

Don’t like the way the courts are ruling? Undermine the legitimacy of the judiciary.  

Don’t like the fact that Donald Trump is president again? Insist it’s the role of his own hires to put up “guardrails” against his agenda.

And the phenomenon isn’t just confined to America: Last week a British radio host asked me about Trump’s intention to reinstate his “Schedule F” initiative, an executive order that would allow dramatically more presidential control over hiring and firing. 

The despondent correspondent asked in worried tones whether such a program would “remove yet another check against an overreaching president.”

That attitude, of course, is the foundation on which the deep state is built: The notion that officials out there who are “above politics” (read: unelected bureaucrats) will save us from our own electoral decisions.  

It is also completely violative of our US Constitution. 

The executive branch is not, and cannot be, a check against . . . the executive branch. 

That job falls to the legislative and the judicial branches, which have been doing it quite well for nearly a quarter of a millennium. My guess is they will continue to do so.  

(As an aside: a properly functioning and reputable press corps also has traditionally played a role in that balance of power. But most of them are so one-sided now as to be neither of those things.)

My concerned British inquisitor can be forgiven for not knowing his American civics; domestic media — and pretty much everybody else on the left who is grasping at straws that someone will overrule the voters — have no such excuse. 

So, my advice to the bedwetting left:  Loosen the clutch on your pearls a little bit. You will get the same “guardrails” for Trump that you got for Biden, Bush and Obama. 

The name on the ballot was “Donald J. Trump” — not “Donald J. Trump, so long as he hires people MSNBC likes.”

Mick Mulvaney, White House chief of staff under President Trump, is a contributor to NewsNation.