THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s editors do not hold identical opinions on the frequently baffling and always changing phenomenon known as President Donald Trump. It’s fair to say that none of us is a fan of the president, but some of us are more critical, some more sympathetic. All of us, however, were appalled and saddened by Trump’s behavior in Helsinki, Finland on Monday.

Trump has of course long refused to concede what’s patently obvious to everybody else: that operatives of the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election. The president has long been unwilling to admit this reality, feeling as he does that the media likes to talk about it mainly in order to suggest that he only won the election against Hillary Clinton with the aid of Russian troublemakers.

It is, perhaps, understandable that a narcissist like Trump would feel some inner conflict about dealing with this subject. The trouble is that he does not and evidently cannot distinguish between (a) the now well documented verdict that Russian operatives interfered with the U.S. election and (b) the as yet unproven accusation that the Trump campaign actively participated with the Russians in their efforts. So offended is he by even the mention of the latter that he is willing to deny the former—even to the point of publicly taking the word of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin against his own intelligence personnel on the question of Russian meddling. Trump has chosen, in public, not to grasp the difference between the two.

Asked whether Trump credits American intelligence officials’ conclusion that the Russian government was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s server, Trump could have declined to answer or answered vaguely. Instead the president complained again that the FBI didn’t confiscate his 2016 opponent’s email server, and then took Putin’s side: “My people came to me, [Director of National Intelligence] Dan Coats and some others, they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this, I don’t see any reason why it would be [Russia].”

It got worse. When Putin—not Trump but Putin—was asked why Americans should believe that Russia did not intervene in the 2016 election, Trump jumped in to defend his friend. The president interjected: “The whole concept of that came up perhaps a little bit before, but it came out as a reason why the Democrats lost an election, which frankly they should have been able to win, because the Electoral College is more advantageous for Democrats, as you know, than it is to Republicans. . . . We ran a brilliant campaign, and that’s why I’m president.”

That Trump said all this on foreign soil, and in the presence of this nation’s chief adversary, only adds to the outrage.

The president’s defenders, incapable as ever of criticizing the man for any reason, are now comparing the president’s remarks to Barack Obama’s 2012 open-mic remarks to Russian foreign minister Dmitry Medvedev that “I’ll have a lot more flexibility after I win the election in 2012.” That was a deplorable moment in presidential history, to be sure, but it doesn’t compare to what Trump did in openly crediting a foreign dictator’s assessment over that of American intelligence officials—particularly when the dictator’s assessment is so obviously a lie. In any case, we are fully confident that if Barack Obama had expressed himself as Donald Trump did today, the latter’s defenders would have condemned Obama as the stooge of a foreign government. And they would have been right to do so.

If we judge the administration by its policies rather than the president by his words, Trump doesn’t appear a stooge. But words have consequences—especially words spoken by the leader of one superpower about the leader of another at an open diplomatic forum. His words on Monday encouraged the nation’s enemies, insulted its intelligence officers, made the president himself look like a fool, and thus brought disgrace on the presidency.