Trump’s willingness to see America as comparable to nations like Russia remains a minority position among Republicans. “There is no moral equivalence between that butcher and thug and KGB colonel and the United States of America, the country that Ronald Reagan used to call a shining city on a hill,” John McCain thundered in a speech on the Senate floor this month. “And to allege some kind of moral equivalence between the two is either terribly misinformed or incredibly biased.” McCain didn’t mention Trump, but coming just days after Trump’s O’Reilly interview, the speech was clearly meant as a rebuke.

Still, Trump is finding some rhetorical allies among Republicans, either because they share his foreign policy aims or because they want to ingratiate themselves to the president. This week, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley told reporters from his state, “Russian involvement in our elections ought to be very seriously considered, just like the French politicians are very nervous about the Russian involvement in their elections. But I also said we don’t come to this table hands-free. I told you about the 1948 CIA involvement in the Italian elections where the communists were trying to take over the country and Russia was behind that and our CIA got involved to make sure. None of this stuff should be going on.”

Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who Trump had considered nominating for secretary of state, has drawn similar parallels between American and Russian culpability for international problems. In an interview last month with The Washington Examiner, he contextualized Russian interference in Ukraine by noting, “I don’t believe Putin started this. I believe the West started it when they overthrew a pro-Russian democratically-elected government that was on Russia’s border.”

While Trump’s comments that America has its “killers” and is not “so innocent” might seem surprising coming from a Republican president, they make more sense if we recognize that the GOP has long had an anti-internationalist wing, going back at least to the opposition to America’s entry into the League of Nations after World War I. Anti-internationalists (also sometimes called isolationists) like to throw cold water on claims of American moral superiority, which they see as justification for a globalist foreign policy. For many years this anti-internationalist faction, which runs from Robert Taft to Pat Buchanan, has been a minority faction in the party. With Trump, this minority faction not only took control of the party, but actually won the White House.