Checks and balances.

I can’t count how many times I heard those words in the history and social science classes of my youth. They were less a phrase than a mantra, repeated endlessly by teachers assuring us of our Constitution’s genius. To answer monarchy, to deter despots, our nation’s founders had created this elegant separation of powers and these brilliant checks and balances, which supposedly had the added benefit of inoculating us from extremism. Checks and balances were our tyranny vaccine.

Its efficacy is fading fast. Since his inauguration in January, President Trump has exerted unfettered authority over pretty much anything and everything that tickles his fancy, caresses his ego or bloats his wealth. And he has been largely unchecked by Congress, whose Republican majority is his pathetic pep squad. He has been inadequately balanced by the courts, as his administration contrives ways to delay, defy or otherwise evade their rulings and as he benefits from decades of Republicans’ painstaking elevation of jurists friendly to the party.

He’s the monster the founders dreaded, rehomed from their nightmares to the Resolute Desk, where he’s teaching us a lesson I didn’t get in school: Some of the most important checks and balances reside not in the architecture of our government but in the stirring of our consciences, the murmurings of our souls.

Why is Trump attempting and getting away with power grabs that so few of his predecessors — and certainly none in the past half-century — did? Because he’s unscrupulous and unashamed. Because he’s unmoved by precedent, propriety, decency. Because he’s rapacious, and he has no interest in appetite control.

Presidents as a rule relish ruling, and believe that they’re especially suited to it. That amalgam of ambition and arrogance is what made them reach for the presidency in the first place. But most of our presidents before Trump seemed to worry at least a smidgen about overreaching — about dictatorial behaviors that would alienate allies, offend voters and earn them damnation from historians. They felt pinpricks of honor. Flutters of humility.

Trump is carefree. “I have the right to do anything I want to do — I’m the president of the United States,” he said on Tuesday, when, for three appalling hours, members of his cabinet competed to find the loftiest superlatives, the rosiest adjectives, to describe his majesty. Had one of his recent predecessors uttered that line, it would have been the story of the week, the month, the year.