Trump’s comments mark a massive shift within the GOP. Since the 1940s, solidarity with the Baltic states has been a passion of the American right. Throughout the Cold War, conservatives railed against Franklin Roosevelt’s abandonment of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to Soviet domination at the 1945 Yalta Conference. In 2012, Mitt Romney traveled to Poland to emphasize the Republican argument that President Obama had sold out Eastern Europe in an attempt to curry favor with Vladimir Putin. Think about that for a second. Obama, who this year agreed to deploy NATO battalions to the Baltic states, is still widely derided inside the GOP as insufficiently committed their security. Yet the Republican presidential nominee has now implied that America shouldn’t defend them at all.

But if Trump’s comments about the Baltics constituted his sharpest policy deviation, his comments about Turkey were his most astonishing ideologically. Asked about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s massive crackdown on dissent in the wake of a failed coup, Trump asked, “How are we going to lecture when people are shooting policemen in cold blood?” He added that, “When the world sees how bad the United States is and we start talking about civil liberties, I don’t think we are a very good messenger.”

To grasp how extraordinary those sentences are, it’s worth remembering that Republicans have spent the last seven years accusing Obama of not believing in “American exceptionalism.” Over and over, GOP politicians and conservative pundits have suggested that the core problem with Obama’s foreign policy—the reason he’s presiding over America’s global retreat—is that he doesn’t believe America is any better than other countries. In 2010, Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru wrote a widely discussed National Review cover story arguing that Obama’s lack of faith in American superiority threatened “America’s civilizational self-confidence.” In 2011, Newt Gingrich wrote an entire book about the Obama administration’s assault on American exceptionalism. In 2011, in a major foreign-policy address at the Citadel, Romney declared:

I believe we are an exceptional country with a unique destiny and role in the world. Not exceptional, as the president has derisively said, in the way that the British think Great Britain is exceptional or the Greeks think Greece is exceptional. In Barack Obama’s profoundly mistaken view, there is nothing unique about the United States. But we are exceptional because we are a nation founded on a precious idea …We are a people who, in the language of our Declaration of Independence, hold certain truths to be self-evident: Namely, that all men are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. It is our belief in the universality of these unalienable rights that leads us to our exceptional role on the world stage, that of a great champion of human dignity and human freedom.

In truth, Obama never repudiated the idea that “we are exceptional because we are a nation founded on a precious idea.” In the very 2009 interview Romney cited, in which Obama said, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism,” he also said: “We have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.”