Donald Trump surprised me last night. I expected to hear lurid lies about the 2020 election. What he offered instead was mostly dreary innuendo that convinced nobody.

Which is not to say that his speech was free of lies. Indeed, more or less every word he spoke was a lie, including “a,” “and,” and “the.” But the most spectacular lies weren’t about U.S. elections. They were at the beginning, when Trump boasted about America’s place in the world.

Pew Global Attitudes SurveySource: Pew Research Center

Here’s the part that caught my eye:

We had transgender for everybody, men in women’s sports, crime ravaging our cities, and the whole world was laughing at us as a nation, but not anymore. Two years ago, our country was dead. Now, we are the hottest country anywhere in the world. America is respected like we have never been respected before.

In reality, one of the most spectacular consequences of Trump’s return to power and the mess he has made since has been a collapse of global respect for America. The chart at the top of this post is from Pew’s Global Attitudes Survey, but you don’t need a formal survey to know that the world increasingly despises the U.S. Just travel overseas and talk to people.

And it’s not just public opinion. Governments around the world, very much including nations that used to be our most loyal allies, are scrambling to reduce their dependence, economic and military, on an America that can’t be trusted and has also proved itself far weaker than anyone imagined.

Why do global attitudes toward the U.S. matter? For one thing, they obviously matter enormously to Trump. Claims that America was a laughingstock under Biden but that everyone now admires him are near the top of many of his speeches. Trump is not, to say the least, a man with great inner strength. He lives for external validation, or the appearance of external validation. Clearly, the delusion that the world is in awe of his prowess is key to his fragile sense of self-worth.

More important, Trump’s boasts about America’s international reputation are part of the case he is building for disrupting and/or rejecting the results of the midterm elections. Trump isn’t just insisting that everything is rigged against him. He’s also insisting that since he’s doing such an incredible job — presidenting like nobody has ever presidented before — nobody should get in his way or place any limits on his power.

It’s safe to say that at this point nobody who wasn’t already completely in the Trump tank is being persuaded by all this strutting, or indeed by anything Trump said in last night’s low-energy, boring rant. But remember: At this point, none of what Trump says is really about persuasion. It’s all about laying the groundwork for his attempt to destroy democracy.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and former professor at MIT and Princeton who now teaches at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. From 2000 to 2024, he wrote a column for The New York Times. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Paul Krugman.