Investors can't ignore US President Donald Trump. Credit:Bloomberg "Even when they admit that the US has done something immoral, they like to think they did the wrong thing for the right reason," says Wesley. "There's only a very small segment of the US population – a very small fringe on the Left – that thinks that the US doing the wrong thing is evidence that America itself is immoral." Sure enough, Trump was quickly isolated in this view as leading politicians on both sides took umbrage. "I do think America is exceptional, America is different," said the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell. Trump's former rival Marco Rubio posed: "When has a Democratic political activist ever been poisoned by the GOP or vice versa? We are not the same" as Putin's Russia. The leader of the Democrats in the House, Nancy Pelosi, thought it so remarkable that she said: "I want to know what the Russians have on Donald Trump."

Illustration by Dionne Gain Trump's comment is the remark of someone who sees America as just one country among many, all equally unprincipled. Countries deal with each other without any sense of right and wrong but solely on a transactional basis of who can extract what from whom. It's about power and advantage. This helps explain a president who doesn't seem to see any difference between democracies and dictatorships, between allies and enemies. Last week he told Mexico's president he might order the invasion of his country, though his staff explained this as humour. At the same time he refused to criticise Moscow's invasion of Crimea or Ukraine. This is consistent with his view of US domestic politics, where he shows no appreciation for democracy as inherently valuable. He does not respect the separation of powers, calling a federal justice a "so-called judge". He does not respect freedom of speech, encouraging his supporters to join him in his "hate" for the media; he doesn't even respect electoral democracy itself, saying he'd only recognise the presidential election result if he won. This is far from the Founding Fathers' America, which was committed to the idea of "certain unalienable rights" for all people, or from Lincoln's America, "a new nation, conceived in liberty," which had a mission to ensure "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth".

It is not the America that, above all other nations, created the United Nations with its idealistic charter to "reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small". Trump's perception of the world as an undifferentiated moral morass would also help explain his attitude to US allies. He does not seem to regard allies as time-tested partners in history's mighty struggles but, in the words of Wesley: "Maybe he sees allies as ultimately cynical power players who have free-ridden the US for years. I take that from the way he parsed his conversation with Malcolm Turnbull." Trump said at the National Prayer Breakfast last week: "We have to be tough. We're taken advantage of by every nation in the world virtually." He cited the refugee deal with Australia as an example. During his campaign he threatened to abandon US alliance commitments to the defence of Japan, South Korea and NATO unless they paid more of the costs. Unable to comprehend any qualitative difference between friends and foes, democrats and dictators, exporters and extortionists, Trump stomps and smashes his way through an intricate set of relationships he cannot comprehend. This also helps explain why Trump might admire a highly effective authoritarian like Putin. A former speechwriter for George W. Bush, David Frum, argued in The Atlantic that rather than extinguish the media altogether, "modern strongmen seek merely to discredit journalism as an institution, by denying that such a thing as independent judgment can exist. All reporting serves an agenda. There is no truth, only competing attempts to grab power."

Russian-born journalist Masha Gessen says that Trump and Putin are alike: "Lying is the message." They lie blatantly, she said, "to assert power over truth itself". In denying the possibility of an independent media, Trump inadvertently grants the Chinese Communist Party a great victory. Xi Jinping has urged a "fierce struggle" against "dangerous ideas" such as Western-style universal values. A party mouthpiece, the Global Times, gloating over Trump's assault on the media, says that "it's time to de-deify" Western media and the ideal of free speech. And in denigrating US allies as not having any inherent worth, Trump gives the Chinese regime another great gift. One of America's unique strengths is that, while China is essentially alone in the world, the US sits at the centre of a formidable system of alliances with some 40 countries. The less these alliances are worth, the smaller America's unique advantage. A ruthless, amoral world of transactional exploitation and relations based on power alone is also known as the law of the jungle. America, still, has a claim to something better, but Trump seems hellbent on giving it away. Peter Hartcher is international editor.