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Among the many consequences of Donald Trump’s illegal and morally bankrupt invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of its president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, there are two that have received very little attention but that are likely to have lasting effects: its blow to the national ego, and the damage it has already inflicted on America’s reputation overseas. 

Arrogant, unaccountable, self-interested, self-important, capricious, avaricious, imperialistic, and dictatorial, the United States has become something it has never been, certainly not in its own consciousness and not in much of the world’s either. 

We are now the bad guys. What’s more, we know it.

In those earlier, innocent, halcyon days, we regarded ourselves as a model for the rest of the world, and so, in many cases, did they. We were an idea for a nation before we were even a nation: a grand project of equality — slavery and Jim Crow and the treatment of Native Americans notwithstanding. And as the nation grew more powerful, its self-image shone more brightly. 

“The last best hope of mankind,” Abraham Lincoln said of America. 

A place that “lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he pleases,” said Woodrow Wilson. 

A “great social experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose,” said Herbert Hoover. 

And, more recently, Ronald Reagan echoed the words of the early Colonial Era’s John Winthrop, who, even before the country’s inception, saw this land as a moral exemplar — a “city on a hill.” 

From the Gettysburg Address through Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, this idea was deep in our DNA, if not always in our actual history. We were a good people — a kind nation. For generations, that ideal has been a great source of pride.

Of course, goodness, especially the notion of national goodness, is relative. We were never as good as we professed to be. We committed terrible atrocities. And as much as we took pride in our alleged goodness, we also, unaccountably, took pride in our moral deficiencies. This has long been a racist, nativist, misogynistic, antisemitic, homophobic nation — a white-supremacist nation. 

And these weren’t just warts. These were, and still are, as much a part of our DNA as is the kindness. You can’t wish them away, especially not in Trump’s America, where the uglier we are, often the prouder we are of ourselves. That is intrinsic to MAGA.

Still, as nations go and despite the long tally of errors and cruelty, our sense of goodness wasn’t entirely unwarranted. We fought to make the world safe for democracy. We defeated Adolf Hitler. We challenged Josef Stalin. We aided Europe with the Marshall Plan. We formed NATO and the United Nations. The democratic world turned to us in times of peril, not because we were the most powerful nation in the world, though we were, but because we were in many ways the most virtuous, the one that could, it was believed, be trusted. 

Again, I don’t want to get carried away in a mist of patriotic bliss. This isn’t to say that even the purported idealism wasn’t frequently misplaced or that the US didn’t sometimes verge on the vainglorious as well as the heinous. Vietnam and Iraq are two egregious examples of hubris and worse. 

But what happened last week in Venezuela is different from those tragic errors because it was so self-evidently wrong and because there was such glee in it. 

This was our leaders actually luxuriating in their badness, effusing over how the US could do anything it wanted to whomever it wanted with impunity. It was an action without even the pretext of idealism, a violation of the very concept of lawful behavior among civilized nations, a ruthless and selfish act, the act of a rogue nation, not a moral exemplar — a city no longer on a hill but in the depths of hell. 

This wasn’t idealistic. This was venal. This wasn’t about our heart. This was about our muscle. This wasn’t about our purpose. This was about our power. This wasn’t about our setting an example. This was about our terrorizing through intimidation. And this wasn’t about what we could give the world. This was about what we could take from it. 

Stephen Miller unashamedly said so. This is a world, he told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” 

No hint of goodness there. This isn’t American language. This is the language of Nazi Germany. 

As I said, we know it, and so does the world. Our international stock has probably never been so low. We can’t pretend that the invasion was anything other than what it was — an act so nakedly reprehensible that Trump himself couldn’t and didn’t even defend it as a blow for democracy (a word he didn’t mention once in his speech to the nation), but rather as a looting of oil. 

When miscreants are called out for their transgressions, their first impulse is to say, “That isn’t who I am.” But this is exactly who we are now in Trump’s America. We are the thugs and bullies. 

We are the kind of nation from which we sought to save the world once upon a time, and now the world is afraid of us — terrified about what we might do next now that we have lost our moral bearings entirely.

That is a scar that may and should mark us for a long time to come. We are the bad guys.