In the week before President Donald Trump’s Islam-focused speech in Saudi Arabia, American Muslims collectively cringed over the big question: Just how bad could it be?

Not as bad as imagined, it turns out, but still unimpressive.

US Muslims said Trump’s address Sunday at a summit in Riyadh was remarkable mainly for its blandness — shopworn lines about good versus evil from a president who once blamed his Saudi hosts for 9/11, who floated the idea of shutting down mosques, and who said, “I think Islam hates us.”

American Muslims also noted a glaring omission in the half-hour speech: themselves. There was no acknowledgment of the contributions of the athletes, doctors, actors, and tech entrepreneurs who are among more than 3.3 million Muslims living in the United States.

“You don’t mention them once in your entire speech?” said Adnan Zulfiqar, a Philadelphia-based Truman National Security Project fellow who studies foreign policy in the Muslim world. “What that tells me is that Trump’s conception of America is not only Muslim-free but, in many respects, minority-free. He easily engages with Islam as a foreign ‘other,’ as opposed to Islam and Muslims as part of the American fabric.”

Trump, a day after a lavish royal welcome that was scrubbed of women and protesters, waxed poetic about standing together against the killing of innocents and the oppression of women. Trump said he hadn’t come to lecture (though he did) and that he was interested only in gradual reforms, not interventions — a reassuring message for authoritarian Arab allies such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan.

Trump ditched his base’s preferred terminology of “radical Islamic terrorism” and, in most places, used less inflammatory terms such as “radicalism” and “extremism.” It was the kind of language Trump used to attack his predecessor President Barack Obama for using.

"We welcome President Trump's recognition of Islam as 'one of the world's great faiths,' but that recognition does not wipe out years of well-documented anti-Islam animus,” Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement. “The president should also recognize the contributions American Muslims make — and have made for generations — to the betterment of our nation.”

To many US Muslims, the about-face showed that Trump considers the faith of 1.7 billion people as just another negotiable, his public stances on Islam changing whichever way the wind — or a $110 billion weapons deal — blows. He bashed Islam in front of anti-immigrant US voters he needed to win the election; he embraced Islam in front of Middle Eastern autocrats whose help he needs on counterterrorism and trade issues.