When your job is to stand up for your policies and fight to get them enacted, you have to actually fight.

I hear you, but you can't do that and also claim that one of your important policies is that fighting is bad. Metaphorically speaking, of course. If you want to claim that a given tactic should have no place in politics (like heckling a President during a SOTU), you can't also do that thing. The fact that the other side is also doing it doesn't matter, because the voters understand that the tactic can't be that bad or you wouldn't also be doing it.

If you want to advocate that Presidents from your party should get maximally creative in pushing the bounds of executive power to "stand up for" the policies they support, pushing the boundaries of the office well past the point where the courts find them unlawful, then it's going to be harder to convince voters that it's terrible if the opposing party does it also. Not impossible....and if the other party does it too you have defenses against criticisms. But if you are pushing the envelope in the name of "fighting" for your policies, then it makes it hard to advocate against envelope-pushing.