Even by agreeing to the summit, the U.S. was engaged in a grand act of flattering North Korea, and regardless of how it turned out, it was going to be a huge propaganda win for Pyongyang. Still, the honeyed language Trump deployed was noteworthy for a president who has often seemed allergic to diplomacy. Even when standing with close American allies, the president has a tendency to veer off script and create incidents, a pattern that his defenders have attributed to his refusal to play by the stale, old-fashioned rules of traditional diplomatic protocol. In Singapore, however, Trump kept to his theme.

Whether that theme was wise or moral, however, is a different question. Even aside from the contents of the agreement that Trump and Kim signed—a vague, four-part declaration that seems to hold North Korea to very little—Trump chose to abandon the historic American focus on human rights in the brutally repressive totalitarian dictatorship. At the press conference after the summit, Trump shrugged.

“I believe it’s a rough situation over there,” he said. “It’s rough in a lot of places, by the way, not just there.”

This is false equivalence: While many countries abuse human rights, the scale and depth of the North Korean regime’s brutality is extremely unusual, with up to 130,000 people in concentration camps. It is perhaps unsurprising that a president who boasted that he hadn’t bothered to prepare for the summit didn’t grasp this. Or perhaps it was a conscious decision. Pressed on North Korean abuses by Voice of America’s Greta Van Susteren, Trump seemed to suggest that the country’s history was meaningless, and he would judge it only on its recent behavior.

“Look, he’s doing what he’s seen done, if you look at it,” Trump said. “But, I really have to go by today and by yesterday and by a couple of weeks ago because that’s really when this whole thing started.”

Trump also said that the death of Otto Warmbier, an American who was detained in North Korea but transferred home shortly before dying, helped to create the conditions for the summit. Warmbier’s family has said that he was “systematically tortured and intentionally injured” by the Kim regime.

But the indifference to human-rights abuses also echoes some of Trump’s prior statements—during the 2016 presidential campaign, for example, he said the U.S. had no right to lecture Turkey on human rights and declined to condemn Russia’s brutality, telling Bill O’Reilly, “You got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?”

Trump’s choice of comparisons is telling. Despite documented abuses in countries like Turkey, Russia, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia, he has found himself drawn to their leaders—generally outsize, swaggering autocrats with little concern for rule of law. Trump congratulated Erdogan on a controversial, anti-democratic referendum (declining to press the human-rights angle) and infamously disregarded staff advice warning, “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” Vladimir Putin on a rigged electoral win.