In 2006, two years before the crash that would destroy the livelihoods of millions of Americans, Donald J. Trump said he “sort of hope[d]” for that eventuality. He stood to make money.

Confronted by Hillary Clinton with that comment at Monday’s debate, Trump did nothing to disavow it. To the contrary, he defended it: “That’s called business, by the way,” he condescended.

Together these remarks showcase a callous indifference to other people’s hardships—an indifference that, my colleague Conor Friedersdorf writes, “may matter little for a Manhattan mogul, but matters very much for someone asking to be entrusted with representing every American.” No reasonable person who has followed along over these last few months could view such an attitude as an aberration. Rather, it fits in precisely with Trump’s long and documented history of putting himself first, even when it means demolishing those who are in his way. Here is a person, a person who may very well become the next president of the United States, who is seemingly unable to imagine what it’s like to be someone else.

But these comments represent another failure of the imagination as well, and that is a total deference to an idea of “business” to be obeyed as though it were handed down to Moses at Sinai. “Business” is not some eternal, naturally occurring phenomenon. It is socially constructed, guided by the laws and cultures of a given time and place, and the sort of business that Trump reveres is in fact very specific to America over the last four decades or so.