Or maybe it is, as it so often is with Trump, the most puerile answer: He is affronted by the suggestion that he won his election illegitimately. This is, after all, a man who is still obsessing on the size of his inauguration crowd and how he won Wisconsin’s electoral votes and Ronald Reagan didn’t. (Except that Reagan did.)

So rather than accept the reality, laid out in detail by his own Justice Department, that we are in a dangerous cyberwar with Russia, the president did what he does best. The “Apricot Toddler,” as he was dubbed in Britain, pounds the high chair, makes messes, pushes buttons, stage-manages cliffhangers and filigrees his “labyrinth of lies,” as Jaron Lanier calls it.

Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, gave an interestingly timed press conference Friday that overshadowed Trump’s moment with the queen — a split-screen situation that must have really steamed him. It was as though they were sending a message to Trump before his Putin meeting Monday that “We’ve got our eye on you.”

Rosenstein said he briefed the president before Friday’s indictment of the 12 Russian agents — military officers who wouldn’t have made a move without Putin’s blessing. So if Trump got through his whole briefing, he would have been aware of this hair-raising fact: that on the same day in July 2016 that he publicly urged Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s “30,000 emails that are missing,” Russian hackers tried for the first time to break into her servers.

Even so, he was his usual blithe self about Russia in the news conference with Theresa May at Chequers. He knocked Robert Mueller’s “rigged witch hunt” and said that he would “firmly” ask Putin whether Russia meddled in our election, but that he doubted there would be any “Perry Mason” moment where Putin would break down and confess, saying, “Gee, I did it, I did it, you got me.”

But there is no question for Putin any more. The question now is for Trump: What are you going to do about the Russian attack on America?

Instead, as politicians on both sides of the aisle got increasingly nervous about the Helsinki Rendezvous With Perfidy, the White House put out a statement that was another masterpiece of idiocy designed to protect Trump’s gossamer ego:

“There is no allegation in this indictment that Americans knew that they were corresponding with Russians. There is no allegation in this indictment that any American citizen committed a crime. There is no allegation that the conspiracy changed the vote count or affected any election result.”