As Khan’s full remarks make clear, the mayor was not soft-pedaling the attack, which he condemned in blunt terms. Rather, he was saying that the increased police presence offered no need for additional concern. It comes as no shock by now that Trump would misrepresent comments or take them badly out of context for his own political gain, but the tactic is no less distasteful for being habitual. In the broader context of his statement, Khan was making an argument about how populations should react to terrorism: With anger, with sadness, with rejection, but also with courage and a refusal to given in to fear.

Predicating the public response to terror attacks based on interpretations of “what the terrorists want” is a slippery, trap-laden, and often self-serving approach. For example, cracking down on civil liberties after a terrorist attack is not unwise “because it’s what the terrorists want,” but because cracking down on civil liberties is unwise and immoral per se. However, if there is one thing that it is safe to say terrorists want, it is to sow terror. It’s the definition of the term: political violence meant to seed fear and intimidation. Hence Khan’s statement that “we will never let them win, nor will we allow to cower our city.”

The idea of maintaining a stiff upper lip is quintessentially British, of course, and even more quintessentially Londoner: Think of the steadfast response to German bombardment during the Battle of Britain. But though Trump pays lip service to wartime leader Winston Churchill—restoring a bust of the prime minister to the Oval Office, for example—he has consistently taken a different approach in response to attacks. Refusal to back down in the face of adversity is not uniquely British. Churchill’s American counterpart, Franklin Roosevelt, famously cautioned in his 1933 first inaugural address that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Trump is the panic president, bearing a radically opposed message: Fear is not only acceptable, but necessary. Rarely does one see a leader, much less the leader of a liberal democracy, actively embracing, even calling for, panic. But this is Trump’s response, ridiculing Khan’s plea for calm among Londoners. If it is little surprise to see tired demagogues like Lou Dobbs do this, it is distressing to see it in the president of the United States. (There may be a connection—Trump’s rhetoric seems to often derive directly from Fox, Dobbs’s employer.)

This is not a new tendency for Trump. It has been evident since he announced his candidacy almost two years ago, in which he claimed (without substantiation) that unauthorized immigrants were bringing a crime wave with them over the border. It runs through his doomsaying acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last summer, on to his pronouncements of “American carnage” in his inaugural address, and in his repeated, dishonest claims of a nation in chaotic thrall to crime. It is also central to his claim that the only way to stop terrorism in the United States is to cut off Muslim immigration, even if political and legal realities have forced him to scale back that promise.