Give the man his due. President Donald Trump has undeniable talents. Colorado politicians are learning.

Chief among The Don’s skills is taking the self-serving, ethically dubious behavior of previous politicians and putting it on steroids.

Or, to borrow from the only documentary that tells the whole truth about anything, “This Is Spinal Tap,” Trump turns it up to 11.

Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden both stretched executive power when Congress wouldn’t give them what they wanted. Their supporters applauded. Obama even bragged about governing with a telephone and a pen and was applauded.

Trump issues his own questionable executive orders and suddenly the media reach for the smelling salts, suburbanites discover the word “dictator and attendance at No Kings rallies becomes mandatory.

Trump deserves plenty of that criticism. What he does not deserve is the fiction that he invented the behavior.

Bernie Sanders entered Congress as a socialist and emerged a multimillionaire. Joe Biden spent virtually his entire career in public office and became uber-wealthy. Washington remains the only place in America where people enter government to serve others and somehow leave serving themselves very well.

Trump does the same unethical crap, but louder, gaudier and with his name written across it in gold.

Trump’s children prosper in plain sight and at industrial scale. He launches meme coins and makes a billion.

It is unethical one-upmanship: Whatever previous politicians can do, Donald J. Trump can do bigger, brasher and with a gift shop.

Of course he should be criticized. The media and the Trump-phobes are right to call him out. But their outrage is difficult to take seriously when the same people served as accomplices, apologists or potted plants while their own side engaged in fundamentally similar conduct.

If self-dealing becomes corruption only when the return reaches Trumpian proportions, then the ethical standard isn’t about the conduct. It’s about the commission size.

That is no way to run a democracy. A little consistency would go a long way.

Which brings us to the Colorado legislature, where self-dealing is conducted without gold lettering but with impressive enthusiasm.

State Rep. Lorena Garcia offers a useful example.

Taxpayers pay Garcia nearly $50,000 a year, plus expenses and per diem, to serve in the legislature. Part of that job is voting on a state budget which starves road funding but distributes enormous sums to nonprofit organizations.

One of those organizations is the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition, or CSPC.

And — in a coincidence so magnificent it deserves its own historic marker — Garcia is CSPC’s CEO.

The nonprofit pays her roughly $133,000 a year, even though she’s out of the office 120 days a year during Colorado’s legislative session. Not long ago, she was making about $57,000 to run the organization. How did she deserve the bump in pay?

In total, CSPC has reportedly received nearly $2 million through Colorado taxpayer-funded grants and programs since she came on board. Its most recently available filings also disclosed roughly $65,000 in transactions to Lorena’s parents.

None of that necessarily means a law was broken. “Technically legal,” however, is a very low ethical bar.

If Trump’s self-dealing is wrong — and it is — why isn’t this worthy of the same scrutiny?

Then the story becomes even more fun.

Supporters of Initiative 195 recently submitted signatures in hopes of placing a graduated state income tax on this fall’s ballot.

Getting a statewide measure onto the ballot is difficult. Organizers need signatures from across Colorado, including distant and less populated state Senate districts. Paid petition circulators are not inexpensive.

So, when the campaign needed money, guess which organization stepped forward?

Go ahead. Take your time.

Garcia’s nonprofit.

According to state campaign-finance records, CSPC contributed more than $88,000 of (arguably) your money to the committee promoting the measure — nearly one-third of the committee’s reported contributions at the time.

Maybe every dollar can be explained. Maybe every form was filed correctly. Maybe every lawyer involved can sleep like a baby.

But if your ethical defense requires a flowchart, three accountants and the phrase “no law appears to have been broken,” you do not have much of an ethical defense.

Yes, Donald Trump is a bastard for using public office to enrich himself and those around him.

The trouble is not that his critics say so.

The trouble is how many of them whisper when the bastard is on their team.

Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute in Denver and hosts “The Devil’s Advocate with Jon Caldara” on Colorado Public Television Channel 12. His column appears Sundays in Colorado Politics.