Perhaps not since June 11, 1948, when Harry Truman, campaigning at a whistle stop in Eugene, Oregon, described the murderous dictator Joseph Stalin as “a prisoner of the politburo” has a president said anything so astonishing about the leader of a country that has been, in one wary way or another, an adversary of the United States since the end of World War II. That “President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial” of Russian hacking (as Trump admiringly put it) is irrelevant. Trump’s own intelligence officials told him, before he even took office, that the evidence was crystal clear, according to The New York Times.

“Apart from the fact that Trump is a transparent narcissist, he is woefully inexperienced and [that] speaks volumes about having someone with no elective experience as president,” says the historian Robert Dallek. “Three things may be at work in his dealings with Putin: He can’t admit Russian help for fear it will call into question the legitimacy of his election; or it is the result of whatever Putin has on him; or it speaks to his financial connections to the Russians. Whatever the truth, Trump simply comes across as someone who never should have won the presidency. His Helsinki performance will cast a long shadow.”

Indeed, Trump’s comments this week—and his unpersuasive efforts to walk them back as a matter of would versus wouldn’t—make past presidential blunders in Russian relations look like child’s play by comparison.

In fact, Trump’s remarks were not so much a blunder at all as they were a candid, unscripted statement of his most deeply held views. Contrast them with Truman’s unfathomable description of his dealings with Stalin at the Potsdam Conference at the end of World War II. “I got very well acquainted with Joe Stalin and I like Old Joe,” Truman told his astounded campaign audience in 1948, in the middle of the Berlin Blockade, in which the Soviets were blocking the Allies’ land access to West Berlin in the Cold War. “He is a decent fellow. But Joe is a prisoner of the politburo. He can’t do what he wants to. He makes agreements and, if he could, he would keep them. But the people who run the government are very specific in saying that he can’t keep them.”

Truman’s impromptu statement was a flat contradiction of American policy, and Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett had made a frantic plea to the speechwriter Clark Clifford, aboard the presidential train, to have Truman cut it out. In later years, senior Truman aides remained unsure just what had moved the president to offer such an analysis, apart from the fact that Stalin may have been courteous to him at his first international conference after succeeding Franklin D. Roosevelt.



Much less well remembered is what Truman said next, concluding his remarks with an anodyne expression of hope: “Now sometime or other, that great country and this great country are going to understand that their mutual interests mean the welfare and peace of the world as a whole.”