Sunday night, MetLife Stadium, and Spain had just beaten Argentina to win the World Cup. Rodri stood at the edge of the trophy platform, seconds from the moment his whole career had been circling toward. The hoist, the roar, the flag, gold confetti raining down on a team that had earned every inch of it.

And there, wedged into the frame, refusing to leave, stood the lumbering, awkward bulk of the President of the United States.

Gianni Infantino jogged over, actually jogged, a grown man in a suit and blinding white athletic shoes trotting across a stadium stage like a substitute teacher chasing a bully who won’t sit down, and tried to usher him off. Trump stayed put. He gave a little laugh, planted himself further into the shot, and then, because the moment apparently called for it, broke into his two-step. The one you’ve seen a hundred times by now. Hips first, elbows out, a wedding-granddad shuffle, performed a few feet from a team that had just won the biggest prize in sports and hadn’t invited him to the photo.

The stadium answered with a wall of sound. Eighty thousand throats booing at once, the noise rolled over the stage, but he was oblivious. 

I watched from my flat in Barcelona, seven time zones and one identity crisis away from the country that raised me, and thought: there it is. There’s my birth country, personified in one frame. Big. Lumbering. Awkward as a bully at a dance he wasn’t asked to. Standing in the world’s photograph because leaving the frame and sharing the spotlight has never once occurred to him. After all, he is the greatest President of the greatest country in the world.

He ran this exact play a year earlier too, planted himself in Chelsea’s Club World Cup celebration, pocketed a medal on his way out. This is a pattern. This is a thuggish personality. Nobody has to invent the metaphor; he writes it himself, but it is particularly glaring when acted out live, on international television (when one out of every three people in the world are watching) for anyone paying attention.

Stay with the metaphor a minute longer, because it keeps paying out.

Here’s a man who couldn’t explain a large language model if his presidency depended on it, presiding over the country that supposedly invented the future. Here’s a man dragging America back toward coal and crude while the rest of the planet builds solar farms, campaigning on “unleashing” oil like it’s 1954 and thinks the future runs on the same fuel the past did. He pulled the United States out of the Paris accord again, the second time now, and he’s working on walking the country out of the UN’s climate body too, as if the weather will lose America’s forwarding address.

And immigrants, the people scrubbing bedpans in nursing homes, framing houses, picking the fruit that ends up on their table, paying into a Social Security system that a graying, shrinking American population is sucking dry—he wants those immigrants gone. Wants the welcome mat revoked right as the workforce thins, the birth rate keeps sliding, and the tax base needs every able body it can get. He’s raised the price of a single work visa to six figures, like he’s trying to make sure the educated ones go somewhere else too.

Now put Spain next to that. Extraordinary Spain, doubling its wind and solar in under seven years, running a third of its power on sunlight some months, posting some of the cheapest electricity on the continent because it built forward instead of backward. Extraordinary Spain, whose economy, the same one Trump likes to call “a loser, a slow, socialist, over-taxed, sinking ship,” added more new residents last year than almost the entire rest of the European Union combined, immigration doing the heavy lifting since Spaniards, like most of the world, aren’t having enough babies to replace themselves either.

He awkwardly danced on a stage he wasn’t invited to, in front of a team from a country that gets right the exact things he gets wrong, and never once caught the joke.

So who are the losers now?

Rodri and Spain got their trophies eventually. Fortunately, the cameras found the team before the moment could be fully swallowed. Spain went home world champions, champions of a sport, and, if you look at the truth, of a whole different way of running a country.

And I went to bed in Barcelona, an ocean between me and that stage, picturing the aging and increasingly irrelevant symbol of my old country still down there in the corner of the frame, out of time, but right on brand, four seconds behind the music, and decades behind the world, dancing like the whole world was watching only him.