Earlier this year, as Donald Trump took steps to bring his White House into closer alignment with Russia, he decided to start calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator” — he label he tends not to apply to actual dictators.

By Trump’s reasoning, Zelenskyy might’ve been elected by a large majority in 2019, but given the Russian invasion and ongoing war, Ukrainians haven’t been able to vote in a presidential election since then. As The Washington Post put in a fact-check piece earlier this year, “It would be difficult to hold elections during war and when Russia holds 20 percent of the country.”

During the Ukrainian president’s latest visit to the Oval Office, this came up in an unexpected way. NBC News reported:

In response to a question about whether Zelenskyy intends to hold elections in his country, last conducted in 2019 before a pause due to the ongoing war, Trump quipped about adopting a similar approach. ‘So you say, during the war, you can’t have elections,’ Trump responded. ‘Say, three and a half years from now — so you mean, if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections.’

In context, the Republican made the comments in a joking way.

Given the larger circumstances, Trump’s attempt at humor wasn’t exactly funny.

To the extent that substantive details matter, Ukraine didn’t suspend its elections simply because it’s at war, but rather, because an invading military force is currently occupying a significant chunk of its territory while targeting civilians in the rest of the country. Trump made it sound as if the 2028 cycle might somehow be in doubt “if we happen to be in a war with somebody,” but that’s not how any of this works.

For that matter, even if there were some kind of invading military force on American soil, which hasn’t happened in more than two centuries, the president wouldn’t have the authority to simply postpone elections on his own.

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But what made the Republican’s comments especially notable is the larger context. We are, after all, talking about an American president who has repeatedly talked about ignoring the U.S. Constitution and seeking a third term. Trump has similarly talked about “terminating” parts of the Constitution that stand in the way of his ambitions and creating a temporary American “dictatorship.”

Indeed, as recently as last week, after militarizing the nation’s capital without cause, Trump noted that his critics have called him a “dictator” — a claim he dismissed, not as wrong, but as irrelevant.

And did I mention that after he lost his 2020 re-election bid, Trump launched an effort to overturn the results and remain in office anyway, leading to multiple felony charges? Because that happened, too.

With this in mind, it was tough to laugh at his “joke.”