Donald Trump may talk about wanting to act as “a dictator” if he wins a second term. But what Trump really wants is to be a king. The ousted former president’s demand that he be granted absolute immunity from prosecution for his many crimes—including a direct attack on American democracy that US Representative Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chaired the House committee on January 6, correctly identified as a “sprawling, multi-step conspiracy” which led to an “attempted coup”—is radically at odds with the intentions of the founders of the American experiment.

Trump’s interpretation of the US Constitution, a document he has never understood or respected, would jettison historic constraints on the presidency that were designed to assure that the fledgling United States would not become a mirror image of the monarchy the revolutionaries of 1776 fought against. Yet, as wrongheaded as Trump’s attempt to reinterpret the Constitution may be, the determination of key Republicans in the Senate—as well as their election arm—to support the former president’s infamy is even more un-American. And even more dangerous.

In March, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and its powerful chairman, Montana Senator Steve Daines, filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in support of Trump’s presidential immunity appeal. Spinning an elaborate legal fantasy regarding the supposed perils of allowing presidents and former presidents to be held to account for criminal wrongdoing, the brief alleged that a failure to uphold Trump’s expansive claims to immunity would “incapacitate every future President with de facto blackmail and extortion while in office, and condemn him to years of post-office trauma at the hands of political opponents.”

Lawyers for Daines and the NRSC were actually more over-the-top in the advocacy for presidential immunity than Trump’s legal team, as the committee and its chair argued that a D.C. Circuit Court decision to reject Trump‘s immunity claim is “akin to a loaded gun lying on the table that future litigants can now wield against presidents (and former presidents) of all political persuasions.”

That’s absurd. The lower-court ruling, which Trump is trying to get his allies on the Supreme Court to overturn, simply upheld the standards that have long been accepted with regard to presidential accountability.

Of course, Trump wants to gut those standards. He has always advocated for an imperial presidency. If he gets a second stint in the White House, democracy and its constitutional safeguards would be threatened—no matter what the high court decides.

But the signal from Daines is an ominous one, as it seeks to boost Trump by undermining the basic premises of America’s system of checks and balances. That would be troubling coming from any senator. But it’s especially concerning in this case, as the senator from Montana has been widely identified as Trump’s favored prospect to replace retiring Senate Republican majority leader Mitch McConnell. Daines can’t show his hand and openly bid for the leadership post while he is chairing the NRSC, as doing so would suggest that he’s more focused on himself than on winning back control of the Senate for the GOP. But Axios suggests, correctly, that “he could become a serious contender overnight if Senate Republicans pick up a multi-seat majority and Trump wins at the top of the ticket.”

Where McConnell has rejected the most extreme arguments for unrestricted presidential immunity (a low bar to clear, but still), Daines embraces them—going so far as to provide legal support for Trump’s court fight.

And he is not the only Senate Republican who is prepared to give Trump a blank check.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz has responded to indictments of Trump for criminal wrongdoing by saying, “I think this is an abuse of power and a persecution of President Trump.” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida used a March appearance on ABC’s This Week to defend Trump’s immunity claim.