Does Trump Believe Putin?

“Iran has never had a better friend than Obama,” Donald Trump tweeted in December 2013, as U.S. negotiators were finalizing a deal with Iran over the country’s nuclear program. So began Trump’s long campaign of ridiculing Barack Obama for the latter’s hopelessly gullible view of the Iranian regime. We agreed with Trump on that subject, and still do. Obama’s insistence on crediting the words of Iran’s leaders, coupled with his barely concealed antipathy to Israel and contempt for all contrary evidence, was by turns laughable and appalling.

How strange, then, to behold that same Donald Trump exhibit precisely the same sort of naïveté toward Russia and, more particularly, Vladimir Putin.

Given the constant media chatter about the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia—recently enlivened after several top Trump advisers were once again required to revise previous claims about contacts with Russian officials or cutouts—one would expect the president to overcompensate by sounding and acting tough on the subject of Russia. Or at least to make an effort not to sound weak and naïve.

But Trump, as his supporters often remind us, is no ordinary president; and so on the subject of Russia he seems to go out of his way to sound like a dupe. On his recently concluded trip to east Asia, he spoke informally to Putin at several points. When asked whether he raised the matter of Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, the president responded: “Every time he sees me, he says, ‘I didn’t do that.’ And I believe, I really believe, that when he tells me that, he means it.”

The president’s argument for taking this manifestly preposterous position is that continuing to dwell on Russia’s assault on the U.S. election system will only get in the way of the two nations’ cooperation on important matters such as Syria and Iran. “Having a good relationship with Russia’s a great, great thing,” he went on to explain. “And this artificial Democratic hit job gets in the way.”