President Donald Trump continues to benefit from the soft bigotry of low expectations. In a major speech in Saudi Arabia on Sunday, he avoided the incendiary Islamophobic rhetoric of his campaign last year and instead adopted the more moderate language of his predecessors, calling Islam “one of the world’s great faiths.” “I stand before you as a representative of the American people, to deliver a message of friendship and hope,” Trump said. “That is why I chose to make my first foreign visit a trip to the heart of the Muslim world, to the nation that serves as custodian of the two holiest sites in the Islamic faith.”

That the president did not say “Islam hates us,” nor “radical Islamic terrorism,” was apparently enough to warrant praise. Axios summed up the conventional wisdom that Trump “gave a measured, disciplined speech to the Muslim world in Saudi Arabia on Sunday, reading entirely off TelePrompTer.” National Review called the speech “pretty good.” On CNN, Rick Santorum ludicrously argued that it would convince the courts to allow his ban on immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries. “To judges in this country who are looking at his immigration ban, it’s going to be very hard to say, ‘This is a Muslim hater, he hates Islam, you know, he wants to ban Muslims,’” said the former Pennsylvania senator.

It’s foolish to give Trump credit for showing the elementary common sense needed to distinguish between the acts of a small number of terrorists and the faith of more than a billion people. It’s also premature to declare that Trump has “pivoted away from his strident assessment of Islam as a religion of hatred,” as The New York Times did in its report. One speech does not a tolerant Trump make. Peter Beinart, writing on Trump’s speech for The Atlantic, has a more convincing theory to explain the chasm between Trump’s hateful campaign and his more politically correct presidency: “Trump is a coward. He says wildly offensive things when the objects of his derision aren’t around, but crumples when he actually meets them.”

This is true of many of Trump’s dealings with foreign leaders. He invariably drops his earlier tough talk—promising to withdraw from NAFTA and label China a currency manipulator—and becomes much more propitiative. But Trump’s cowardice doesn’t fully explain why he was an outright bigot on the campaign trail and has mollified foreign leaders as president. Trump is a salesman who tailors his pitch to different audiences. In his rally speeches, Trump is addressing the masses, but now he’s making his pitch to the elites of other nations. When Trump advocated for a Muslim ban, he was appealing primarily to Islamophobes in America, and perhaps also issuing a warning to prospective Muslim immigrants. With his speech in Saudi Arabia, Trump was sending a message to a much smaller audience: the Saudi royal family and like-minded autocrats in the Middle East.

Unlike George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Trump did not deliver a message for the Muslim masses. He carefully eschewed talk of liberty or democracy, which has been standard presidential rhetoric since Woodrow Wilson. Indeed, Trump made sure that the autocrats in the room knew that the days of democracy promotion were over, saying, “We are not here to lecture—we are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship.” This was the sole part of his speech that faced widespread criticism across the political spectrum. “I think it’s in our national security interest to advocate for democracy, freedom and human rights,” Senator Marco Rubio said. “I would tell you the White House and I have a different approach on the issue of human rights.” Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff called it “a terrible abdication of our global leadership when it comes to advocating for people who are the subject of persecution.”