Over at Slate, Jamelle Bouie has braved the hyperbole of Donald Trump’s speech in Poland last week to suss out what exactly the president is talking about when he says that “Western civilization” is under tremendous threat from outside forces. He points out that while past presidents talked of “‘the West’ in ideological terms – world of free elections and free markets,” Team Trump has foregrounded culture, religion, and most tellingly, race. And its emphasis on Western civilization being a matter of blood lines, and not, say, a pinnacle of democracy and human rights, Bouie shows how Trump's language “fit[s] comfortably into a long history of white nationalist rhetoric.” The president, it seems, has taken his bullshit racism global.

In one sense, it’s ludicrous to listen to Donald Trump try to engage with big ideas about the nature of our “civilization,” not when his ignorance of history, let alone the present, is obvious to all. But of course what we encounter when we read or hear the words of his speech is not an accurate, considered summation of the state of the world, but an expression of the retrograde tribalism and anti-democratic spirit afoot in the West, and elsewhere, that Donald Trump has harnessed and amplified. The president may claim that our threats come from outside, but the greatest challenges of our day come from within, whether you consider economic inequality, a degraded environment quickly approaching a crisis point, a political system engulfed by money and increasingly unresponsive to the needs of the common citizen, or festering racism and misogyny. Donald Trump hasn’t diagnosed our peril; he IS our peril, along with a mindset that encourages us to hate and blame others instead of facing down our own afflictions.