In that light, the notice-giving yesterday was almost subdued. The president held a campaign rally last night in Lexington, Kentucky, a state with thousands of coal jobs. Yet while Trump could once rhapsodize for 27 minutes straight about the alleged unfairness of Paris, he barely mentioned the agreement last night, referring only twice in passing to the “horrible, costly, one-sided Paris climate accord.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was left to fill the void with a brief press release. There are rumors that the Trump 2020 campaign will try to convince voters of its environmental record, which most Americans disapprove of. Perhaps last night was a preview of that strategy.

Back in 2017, the president also promised either to immediately start talks to reenter Paris or to discuss “a really entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States.” Two years on, no such treaty has appeared.

Read: This is what adapting to climate change looks like

But this vow was always a little nonsensical, since Paris is a voluntary agreement. After the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, a climate treaty from the 1990s, the United States made a few demands: Any accord must make no legal distinction between rich and poor countries, and it must not include externally imposed, legally binding emissions cuts. (The first of these demands was set forward in a 95–0 Senate vote.) So the world produced the Paris Agreement, which doesn’t differentiate between rich and poor countries and which doesn’t impose external binding targets.

“We’re withdrawing from something that’s purely voluntary. It doesn’t make any sense,” says Bentley Allan, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s reprehensible—it’s absurd that we’re withdrawing.” The only reason to leave such a treaty is if “you want to actively make the symbolic act of damaging this thing,” Allan told me.

In other words, Trump is not leaving the agreement because he doubts climate science. And he is not leaving it because of what the agreement does: He is already rolling back Barack Obama’s domestic climate rules, which actually accomplished the bulk of emissions cuts. Trump is leaving the Paris Agreement because he actually intends to slow the global transition away from fossil fuels.

Trump’s political opponents—and, sometimes, the press—often term him a “climate-change denier.” But in a way, this term actually flatters him. His stated views about climate science are far too messy and opportunistic to bear any coherent label. Here is a man who can tell New York Times editors that “there is some connectivity” between human activity and climate change and, two years later, say that “people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers,” before finally proclaiming during a snowstorm that it “wouldn’t be bad to have some of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!”