Trump apologists from the anti-anti-Trump school aren’t the only ones who dispute that his suspicious behavior is a manifestation of underlying guilt; many on the left do, too. It will be the scandal of the century if it turns out members of Trump’s campaign coordinated efforts with Russian hackers (directly or through intermediaries) to inflict maximum damage on Clinton’s campaign. And though there is a growing body of evidence to support the collusion theory, it would be irresponsible to discard plausible sets of facts that might explain Trump’s peculiar antics in more benign ways.

But it is also a mistake to interpret everything Trump says and does through the lens of how he hopes to shape perceptions of the past. We can bracket the 2016 campaign entirely, and ask instead how Trump’s words and deeds aim to shape future events. And through that lens, he appears in almost every way to be courting Russian operatives as if they were just more political dirty tricksters working for favors in America.

In the past month, we have learned that Trump’s initial plan was to undo all of the overt penalties the Obama administration imposed on Russia for its interference in the election. The diplomatic facilities in the U.S. that Trump wants to return to Russia—and which Russia is impatiently demanding from him—were impounded as part of that response. And, according to Michael Isikoff, it was only the efforts of alarmed current and former State Department officials that stopped Trump from unilaterally rescinding sanctions Obama had imposed on the Kremlin. These penalties were conceived as disincentives to future meddling—reminders that the U.S. has tools at its disposal to extract a price for subverting its democracy—and Trump has at least signaled his view that he would like the disincentives removed.

Trump’s discussions with Comey likewise point to a kind of malign disinterest in whether the next election is similarly sabotaged. It is plausible that Trump’s public word games about who is responsible for the election interference merely reflect a reluctance to boost the public’s sense that Russia tipped the election to him. But it would be perfectly feasible for Trump to privately support robust law enforcement and intelligence responses to election meddlers. Instead, in all their interactions, according to Comey, Trump never brought it up. Trump separately pressed other intelligence community leaders to intervene against the FBI’s Russia investigation. And, as The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent noted, there is no sign that the Trump White House is taking any heed of the “urgent warning” that Russia might reprise its subversion campaign in 2018 and beyond. To the contrary, Tillerson reportedly wants to collaborate on new cybersecurity strategies with Russia.