President Trump and John Bolton listen during a meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House on Monday. Photograph by Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty

Donald Trump has assumed a concentrated and, for him, almost measured posture after the chemical attack that killed dozens of people in Syria over the weekend. On Twitter, he called out Vladimir Putin as an enabler of “Animal Assad” and promised to exact a “big price” for the attack. Speaking at the White House, Trump pledged to respond to the attack without disclosing what form the response might take. He cancelled a trip to South America in order to concentrate on Syria. And, of course, he placed the blame for the current situation in Syria on Barack Obama, tweeting, “If President Obama had crossed his stated Red Line In The Sand, the Syrian disaster would have ended long ago! Animal Assad would have been history!”

Trump is right to trace the roots of the current predicament to the summer of 2013, when Obama failed to get congressional approval for military intervention in Syria and Putin swooped in to save the day, promising to take charge of eliminating Bashar al-Assad’s chemical arsenal. On September 11, 2013, of all days, the Times published an Op-Ed by Putin, in which he accused the Syrian opposition of using poison gas in order to set up the government and provoke an intervention, cautioned against rendering the United Nations irrelevant by acting without its sanction, and called out Obama for his rhetoric of American exceptionalism. Coming a few years before Americans became intimately familiar with the use of words to mean their opposite, the Op-Ed probably appeared to most readers as an ordinary piece of Russian whataboutism—hypocritical and irritating, perhaps, but basically harmless.

For Putin, however, the publication of that Op-Ed was a highlight of his Presidency. It signified his acceptance as America’s equal partner on the international stage. And, in addressing Americans directly through the nation’s largest newspaper, he was able to frame the conflict in Syria. In his telling, the conflict there was not between a brutal dictator and his opposition (“Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy,” he wrote) but a struggle among many equally unsympathetic factions, in a messy place that Russia and America could agree to clean up together. This was before Russia invaded Ukraine, before sanctions, before Russian election meddling, before Obama snubbed Putin by sending a pointedly low-level delegation to the Sochi Olympics, and long before Russia was stripped of the medals that it won in those Games. In retrospect, September, 2013, was close to the last moment Putin was perceived by most of the world as a legitimate leader.

In September, 2015, Putin tried to recapture that sense of legitimacy when he addressed the U.N. General Assembly with a speech that was essentially an expanded version of that Times Op-Ed. This time, it was designed to convince Obama to create a joint anti-ISIS coalition. Obama ignored the offer. In response, Putin reframed the conflict in Syria as a war between Russia and the United States, and Russia began its bombing raids in Syria.

For the last two and a half years, Russian media have reported on Syria as if it were a war against the United States. So it seems important that the latest chemical attack there took place immediately after the United States imposed the toughest sanctions yet against Russia, which sent the Russian markets and the ruble itself tumbling on Monday. The attack also occurred days after a Russian missile test in the Baltic Sea, timed to coincide with the visit of the Baltic states’ leaders to Washington. And, of course, the chemical attack occurred during a high-level changeover in Trump’s foreign-policy team, between the departure of the national-security adviser, H. R. McMaster, and the Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson—each of whom talked his own tough line on Russia—and the arrival of their replacements, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo.

As soon as the chemical attack happened, Russia deployed words against facts. The Foreign Ministry issued a press statement in which it denied that the chemical attack happened, blamed it on the opposition, and accused the humanitarian organization White Helmets of being a terrorist group—all at the same time. This was not dissimilar to the Russian spin on that other recent act of chemical warfare, the apparent poisoning of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, in Britain, which Russia has also simultaneously denied took place altogether and blamed on the British.

In his own press conference on Monday, with Bolton sitting just behind him, Trump briefly pulled back from his own rage over the F.B.I. raid of his lawyer’s office to frame Syria as a policing problem. He promised to investigate, identify the guilty, and take measures. Going further, Trump took ownership not only of the Syria problem but of the global order: “In our world, we can’t let that happen. Especially when we’re able to, because of the power of the United States, because of the power of our country, we’re able to stop it.” The relationship between those words and the facts on the ground is tenuous. But, in the Trump-Putin universe, the war in Syria is a battle of fictional realities. Both men are asserting their right to do what they want when they want to—to deploy chemical weapons, or to punish the guilty, in a world where each is the king of reality and the sovereign of spin.