Granted, 1998 was quite a while ago. I have grown a whole adult nephew over that stretch. But why does it seem like an entirely different plane of existence from now? The good normal times are gone, I guess—back when we weren’t the grotesque, bullying belligerent our currently reigning Great Menace has made of us.

Or is that really so?

I remember a morning in February of that year waking up and having coffee while watching Madeleine Albright explain to the ever-credulous Matt Where in the World Lauer – in some vacant space between Willard Scott centenarian birthday wishes and Matt cavorting playfully over a stuffed pheasant recipe with Martha Stewart or whatever it was Today had on offer – why the United States might shortly have to bomb Iraq.

The world felt close to snapping. Saddam Hussein was obstructing UN weapons inspectors, Washington was openly preparing for the possibility of military strikes. The question of whether another American attack on Iraq was imminent hung more than a bit heavily for a morning show chat segment. There were serious arguments that the Secretary could and needed to put forward.

But it was then that Albright arrived at the part that nearly made me snort coffee out my nostrils. If force became necessary, Madam Secretary explained, it was because “we are America; we are the indispensable nation.” I think my head snapped as I startled like a spooked horse. “We stand tall,” she continued to an eagerly bright-eyed Lauer, “and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us. I know that the American men and women in uniform are always prepared to sacrifice for freedom, democracy and the American way of life.”

Even then I remember thinking, Oh, come on.

Not merely the world’s strongest country. Not just a country with unusual capacities and therefore unusual responsibilities. Indispensable. And taller. Able to see farther. I thought I might be hallucinating the opening of the old Superman TV show: We are faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive. We fight for truth, justice, and the American way. We are indispensable.

It was Madeleine Albright’s liberal internationalism distilled into its purest, most potent form, and I instantly found it gag-makingly silly even before I had quite worked out why.

It was hardly just Albright. Five years later, with Iraq still in the crosshairs, the vocabulary migrated easily enough from liberal internationalism into neoconservative regime change. In speeches about the war in Iraq, George W. Bush would explain that America’s cause was just, its duty clear. In his 2003 State of the Union address, he proclaimed to Congress and to the watching world that “America is a strong nation, and honorable in the use of our strength. We exercise power without conquest, and we sacrifice for the liberty of strangers.”  And so, Iraq would be disarmed, liberated, democratized. American power became, as always, obligation itself because America alone possessed both the strength and the moral vision to act. The doctrine changed. The flattering higher purpose survived.

Now, a generation later, Donald Trump, talking like a 19th-century freebooter crossed with a 1930s Chicago gangster, tells us Greenland ought to be ours, Panama had better remember who really built the canal, Europe has been taking advantage of us for years, and countries that cannot defend themselves should maybe show a little more gratitude to the country that can.

Like many others, I have found myself stunned and embarrassed by this display of brutish vulgarity.

But lately I have also found myself thinking again about that Madeleine Albright moment over my morning coffee. Maybe Trump has not abolished American exceptionalism nearly as thoroughly as our polite liberal sensibilities would like to imagine. Maybe he has simply changed its accent.

Albright’s accent was mission. We are a city on a hill. We are exceptional because we possess exceptional powers and bear exceptional obligations. Our power required explanation, certainly, but the explanation was flattering: history had placed obligations upon us because only we could meet them.

Trump’s accent is possession. We are great. America, our power, our country, is greater than all the rest. We are exceptional because this is ours, that should be ours, they owe us, they have taken advantage of us, and weaker countries should know where they stand.

The first sounds civilized. The second sounds thuggish. But both arrive at the same remarkably useful conclusion: America is not quite bound by the same limits as everybody else. And that difference in tone makes all the difference in how the power feels from inside.

Albright’s version allowed Americans to experience exceptional power as reluctant stewardship. Trump dispenses with the moral laundering. What liberal sensibilities experience as a shocking moral break may also be just the shock of seeing an old entitlement deprived of its flattering explanation.

Albright’s version allowed Americans to experience exceptional power as reluctant stewardship. We did not dominate because we wanted to dominate; we acted because someone had to, because the alternative was disorder, tyranny, or catastrophe. Extraordinary power carries extraordinary responsibility. We uniquely carried history’s burden.

Trump dispenses with the moral laundering. He says the strong should get what the strong can keep. Perhaps that is what makes Trump’s version so jarring. He has not invented the claim to exceptional permission. He has made it vulgar enough to see plainly: we are stronger, therefore we get to demand more. Like anyone else, we just want what is ours. Unlike anyone else, our unequaled power makes more of what we want rightly ours.

What liberal sensibilities experience as a shocking moral break may also be just the shock of seeing an old entitlement deprived of its flattering explanation.

In the end, in either accent, the hegemon chooses whether and when to accept any of the imagined constraints of the “rules-based order.” As it has been said, “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”

Which brings me back to Madeleine Albright, Matt Lauer, and that morning cup of coffee.

What bothered me then, I think, was not simply the arrogance of calling America indispensable. Maybe I was hearing, beneath all the talk of obligation and responsibility, the same old claim Trump now states without manners: We are different. Therefore we decide what is permitted.