More than a decade ago, I asked a question that seemed fit for a Black Mirror episode: Who cannot be put on a president’s extrajudicial kill list?

Only that query wasn’t something out of a dystopian sci-fi series. It was in response to some real-world news: in the name of fighting terrorism, President Barack Obama had asserted the power to order executions without a judge, jury, or trial.

At the time, some of us were concerned that the power would be abused both by Obama’s administration (which extrajudicially executed three US citizens) and by future presidents. Those concerns intensified after a federal court rubber-stamped Obama’s kill list, and after Obama’s spokesman brushed off the drone killing of an American teenager by saying he “should have [had] a far more responsible father.”

Fast forward to today, and the fears expressed more than a decade ago seem justified as President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth order extrajudicial murders on the high seas in the name of fighting the drug war (all while Trump pardons a drug trafficker convicted in a court of law).

Just like Obama, Trump is reportedly relying on secret memos from the same secret Justice Department office to legally justify the killings. We only know that because a protracted court battle forced the disclosure of a redacted version of one of the Obama-era memos. As Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University put it: “Our government is once again committing grave human rights abuses on the ostensible authority of a legal opinion that is being kept secret.”

It is difficult to know what rules, guidelines, or decision trees — if any — are being used by Trump, but we do know that Obama aides “develop(ed) explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures” for ordering extrajudicial murders, according to the New York Times in 2012.

Read charitably, that could mean Obama tried to put in at least some guardrails for ordering executions. Read less charitably, it could mean that Obama didn’t merely order extrajudicial killings, he also created a secret legal architecture codifying an executive power grab and enshrining the right of Trump and subsequent presidents to murder whomever they please.

Some have wondered whether Trump or Hegseth could eventually be prosecuted for the alleged order to “kill everybody” in one of the boat attacks. But, of course, last year the US Supreme Court ruled that Trump is “entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for his official acts” as president.

The axiom here should be obvious: When a political party legitimizes the overreach of the other party, it can end up radically shifting the Overton Window and normalizing that overreach for all future presidents.

In this case, Obama and rank-and-file Democrats who rightly criticized the Bush-Cheney administration for its post–September 11 executive power grabs ended up then expanding that power grab with little pushback from liberals. Why? Because in the age of tribal partisanship, liberal politics has been more about party loyalty and fan culture than actual policy.

The result: Trump is now on an extrajudicial killing spree emboldened by powers handed to him by former Vice President Dick Cheney and Barack Obama.

Amid the horrifying headlines about drone killings in the Caribbean, I’d like to believe this sequence is a teachable lesson and that Democrats and their liberal supporters wouldn’t make the same mistake again whenever the next Democratic president is sworn in. I’d like to see a future Democratic president actually use their power to pass good legislation, but I’d like to believe that if that president tried to take Trump’s worst executive power grabs even further, Democrats and liberals would break from Obama-era precedent and try to stop or limit the overreach.

But both Cheney and Obama are now valorized as heroes by liberals, even as Trump weaponizes the power they gave him. Maybe Trump has changed the dynamic — maybe lessons will be learned. But I’m not holding my breath, because I know that partisanship is still a hell of a drug.