For Trump, by contrast, “America First” means that American nationalism supersedes those other values. You can see this hierarchy in his policies: his tariffs on foreign goods, cuts in foreign aid, and efforts to reduce even legal immigration. You can see it in his rhetoric. In his inaugural address he declared, “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America.” In his speech to the United Nations last September, he used variations of the word sovereignty 19 times. (In Bush’s final UN address, by contrast, he invoked the word once.)

But it’s not just that Trump wants what’s best for America and Americans. As Orwell suggests, his nationalism expresses itself in a fixation on “competitive prestige … victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations.”

In Trump’s narrative, “the United States has been taken advantage of for decades and decades.” His role is to rectify that and ensure that America wins again. In practice, this often means retaliating for the supposed humiliations that America suffered in the past by humiliating foreign governments in the present. During the campaign, Trump didn’t just say he would build a wall to stop illegal immigration across the southern border. He demanded that Mexico pay for it. At the recent NATO summit, he didn’t just express concern that Germany had entered a pipeline deal with Russia. He publicly berated it for being a “captive of Russia.” After America’s NATO partners agreed to move toward spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, Trump upped his demand to 4 percent.

One reason Trump is so skeptical of NATO and NAFTA is that both institutions are premised on the notion that, by pooling their sovereignty, every member gains. Trump’s nationalism makes this hard for him to accept. His fixation on “competitive prestige” inclines him to believe that if Mexico is benefitting from NAFTA, or Montenegro is benefitting from NATO, America must be losing. Thus, he must renegotiate the deals to reassert America’s position as top dog.

What’s remarkable about Trump’s extreme nationalism is that it coincides with his extreme lack of patriotism. Patriotism, as Orwell implies, requires the subordination of oneself to something larger. It’s an extension of the subordination implied by family and marriage. But Trump isn’t capable of this self-sacrifice in either arena. It’s not clear that he even understands it. Trump’s declaration that Senator John McCain was not “a war hero because he was captured” illustrates this cognitive failure. Trump’s comment suggests that he measures service in war by if one triumphs personally. People who evade capture have triumphed, and are thus heroes. People who get captured—let alone killed—have failed, and are thus not heroes. But the whole point of serving your country in war is that you subordinate your individual self-interest to the country’s. Thus, soldiers who desert—and place their own well-being above the nation’s—are villains. By contrast, those who sacrifice their well-being for the nation’s cause, such as McCain, are heroes.