After teasing his decision on the Paris climate accord on Twitter like some macabre reality-TV stunt, President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that he is pulling the United States out of the historic, 195-nation agreement to lower global carbon emissions, joining Syria and Nicaragua as the only countries not to abide by the treaty.

“In order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord but begin negotiations to re-enter the Paris accord or an entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers,” the president said during a long, rambling speech in the Rose Garden. “So we are getting out, but we will start to negotiate, and we will see if we can make a deal that is fair. And if we can, that‘s great. If we can‘t, that‘s fine.”

The president’s call to renegotiate the climate deal is mostly senseless. As Vanity Fair contributing writer Charles Mann noted, the treaty has been derided by both green and anti-green camps as effectively “toothless.” The 2015 agreement is mostly voluntary, allowing each country to set its own emissions pledges as part of a larger goal of keeping global average temperatures from rising 2°C by the end of the century. The framework for reaching those goals is non-binding, and the U.S. was already on pace to hit its own arbitrary benchmark. It will also take years for the U.S. to officially exit the agreement—at which point Trump may not even be in power.

Of course, the point of abandoning the climate agreement, as the Trump administration seemed to acknowledge, is mostly symbolic. “We’re going to make very clear to the world that we’re not going to be abiding by what the previous administration agreed to," White House energy policy adviser Michael Catanzaro said in a statement. And the message to Trump’s “America First” base is clear. By dropping its environmental commitments, Vice President Mike Pence said Thursday in his introductory comments, Trump is putting “the forgotten men and women of America first.”

About seven in 10 Americans, including a majority of Republicans, say the U.S. should remain in the Paris climate agreement. But among Trump’s most conservative supporters, withdrawing serves a double purpose as a middle finger to Democrats on Capitol Hill, former president Barack Obama, and liberal sensibilities more generally. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” Trump seethed, railing against other nations for taking advantage of the U.S. on trade. “At what point does America get demeaned? At what point do they start laughing at us as a country?”

“America is $20 trillion in debt, cash-strapped cities cannot hire enough police officers or fix vital infrastructure, millions of our citizens are out of work, and yet, billions of dollars that ought to be invested right here in America will be sent to the very countries that have taken our factories and our jobs away from us. So think of that.”

It’s a message that may resonate with many of the white working-class and Rust Belt voters who propelled Trump to power—and one that his nationalist-populist chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, has long been pushing him to adopt. While more moderate members of Trump’s inner circle—including Ivanka Trump and Gary Cohn—reportedly spent months trying to encourage Trump to affirm the Paris accord, Trump was ultimately won over by Bannon and Scott Pruitt, the anti-environmental head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Ditching Paris, Trump insisted, would be a boon for U.S. jobs and industries that have been subjected to “harsh economic restrictions.” While he described himself as “someone who cares deeply about the environment,” the president argued that he “cannot in good conscience support a deal that punishes the United States . . . while imposing no meaningful obligations on the world‘s leading polluters.” He added that he would be willing to work with Democrats—whom he called “obstructionists”—to craft a new, better deal.

Most of these arguments are ultimately misleading. There is little evidence that environmental policies are hurting the U.S. economy, which is at its highest point in a decade, and other leading polluters—including China and India—have already reaffirmed their support for the Paris accord. Democrats, meanwhile, will see little reason to cooperate with the president in his effort to unravel the hard-won environmental legacy of Barack Obama. With Trump’s years-long withdrawal effort expected to conclude after the 2020 election, the president has put the climate-change issue firmly on the ballot.

Obama himself forcefully rebuked Trump’s criticisms, arguing in a statement issued shortly after his Rose Garden announcement that America risks ceding its position of global and economic leadership. “It was bold American ambition that encouraged dozens of other nations to set their sights higher as well. And what made that leadership and ambition possible was America‘s private innovation and public investment in growing industries like wind and solar,” Obama said. “The nations that remain in the Paris agreement will be the nations that reap the benefits in jobs and industries.”