But all bets will be off in Modi’s India if Trump’s draconian calls to ban Muslim travel and kill innocent relatives of terrorists get him elected in America. Such talk will wash away all of India’s Hindu extremists past excesses and encourage their future program of chastening Muslims. Ditto for other majorities in other countries with their own beefs against their minorities.

But even that doesn’t plumb the depths of the disaster that’ll be the Trump presidency.

Countries don’t necessarily look for moral approval from America to set their course. But America is still morally instructive not because it is an inherently noble country — how can that be when its history includes slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow? It is because it became spectacularly successful after it dealt with these sins — and in the process made material advancement synonymous with economic freedom, equality, democracy, individual rights, and humanity across the globe.

Trump’s crude populism to Make America Great Again will sunder precisely this connection.