Oops, he did it again.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump had a rambling conversation with the Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. It was a typical Trump performance: He leaned into his trademark edge-of-the-chair crouch and spooled off long strings of words that were only sometimes on topic or related to one another. (“They call it ‘magnets,’” he helpfully informed Bartimoro at one point when she asked about rare-earth minerals.) But when it came to China, Trump returned to one of his favorite themes: moral equivalence between the United States and authoritarian regimes.

Bartiromo noted that authorities recently arrested some Chinese nationals accused of smuggling in biological materials that could threaten the U.S. food supply. “We don’t know where that came from,” Trump said, waving away the arrests as possibly nothing more than the apprehension of a few “whackos.” Bartiromo pressed on: The Chinese have hacked “into our telecom system; they’ve been stealing intellectual property; fentanyl, COVID, I mean, you know, all of this stuff, so how do you negotiate with obviously a bad actor and trust them on economics?”

And then Trump went for it. “You don’t think we do that to them?” he said with a smirk. “You don’t think we do that to them?” he repeated as Bartiromo struggled during a few seconds of silence. “We do,” the president said. “We do a lot of things.”

“So,” Bartiromo asked, “that’s the way the world works?” Trump shrugged. “That’s the way the world works. It’s a nasty world.”

As a card-carrying expert who taught international relations for more than three decades, I can affirm the president’s assertion that we do, in fact, live in a nasty world. But as a patriotic American, I have a bit more trouble with the idea that the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China are just two bad kids on the playground.

In my many travels to university campuses over the years, I have often heard that America is only one of many horrendous regimes in the world. Usually these pronouncements came from students trying out new intellectual clothes in the safety of an American classroom, or from radicals on the faculty for whom anti-Americanism was a central part of their academic credo. And I know, especially from studying the Cold War, that presidents in my lifetime did a lot of shady, immoral, and illegal things. But I have never heard a president of the United States sound like a graduate student who’s woozy from imbibing too much Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn.

This isn’t the first time that Trump has resorted to this kind of embarrassing equivocation. In early 2017, then–Fox host Bill O’Reilly asked Trump about U.S. relations with Russia and how he might get along with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “He’s a killer,” O’Reilly said. “Putin’s a killer.”

Trump bristled—and rose to Putin’s defense. “There are a lot of killers,” Trump said, with the same kind of half-smiling smirk he deployed at Bartiromo. “We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”

Of course, Trump’s only consistent foreign-policy principle during the past 10 years has been to side with Russia whenever possible. But leaving aside his obsession with Putin, the president’s smears on his own country are not the result of a deeply considered moral position, or even some kind of strategic big-think. Principles are inconvenient, and if they get in the way of winning the moment—the news cycle, a trade negotiation, an argument with a reporter—then they are of no use.

Indeed, Trump has shown, over and over, that he has no real ability to make moral distinctions about anything. Perhaps nothing illustrates this vacuousness more than Bob Woodward’s report that when Trump decided to run for president, an aide told him that his previous pro-choice stances and donations to Democrats would be a problem. “That can be fixed,” Trump said. “I’m—what do you call it? Pro-life.” As Groucho Marx is rumored to have said: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them … well, I have others.”

But there is also a laziness in Trump’s casual slanders against America. If Trump admits that the United States is a far better nation than Russia or China, with a heritage of liberty and democracy that imposes unique responsibilities on America as the leader of the free world, then he would have to do something. He would have to take a stand against Russia’s military aggression and China’s economic predations. He’d have to take the hard path of working with a national-security team to forge policies that are in the long-term interests of the United States rather than the short-term interests of Donald Trump.

Likewise, when Trump depicts America as an unending nightmare of crime and carnage, he’s not only trying to trigger a cortisol rush among his followers; he’s also creating a narrative of despair. It’s a clever approach. He tells Americans that because the world is nasty, all that “shining city on a hill” talk is just stupid and all that matters is making some deals to get them stuff they need. Meanwhile, he paints America as something out of a medieval woodcut of hell, implicitly warning that he can’t really extinguish the lava and the fires but promising to at least put on a show of punishing some of the demons.

This nihilism and helplessness is poisonous to a democracy, a system that only works when citizens take responsibility for their government. It is a narrative that encourages citizens to think of themselves as both scoundrels and victims, crabs in life’s giant bucket who must claw their way up over the backs of their fellow Americans. The modern global order itself—a system of peace, trade, and security built by the genius of American diplomacy and the sacrifices of the American armed forces—is, in Trump’s view, one big criminal struggle among countries that are no better than mob families. In his world, the United States isn’t a leader or an example; it’s just another mook throwing dice against the wall in a back alley.

Some people support Trump because they want certain policies on immigration or taxes or judges. Others enjoy his reality-TV approach to politics. Some of his critics reject his plans; others reject everything about the man and his character. But none of us, as Americans, have to accept Trump’s calumnies about the United States. We are a nation better than the dictatorships in Moscow and Beijing; we enjoy peace and prosperity that predated Trump and will remain when he is gone.

We live in an America governed by Trump. But we do not have to accept that we live in Trump’s America.

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