One of Donald Trump’s chief objections to the notion that Russia meddled in the 2016 election is that it puts an asterisk on his unlikely victory over Hillary Clinton. As such, the deeply insecure president has consistently cast doubt on the findings of his own intelligence community—including in a press conference with Vladimir Putin last year—insisting the whole thing is an “excuse” cooked up by Democrats to explain away their surprise loss. “Someday,” he tweeted earlier this year, “the Fake News Media will turn honest & report that Donald J. Trump was actually a GREAT Candidate!”

But after three years, something of the truth must finally have broken through Trump’s abnormally thick skull. Because on Thursday morning, the president seemed to openly acknowledge that the Kremlin had given him a leg-up against Clinton last cycle. “Russia, Russia, Russia!” he tweeted. “That’s all you heard at the beginning of this Witch Hunt Hoax . . . And now Russia has disappeared because I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected.”

Lest observers believe his admission to be a sign of personal growth, Trump quickly backtracked. Perhaps realizing that he had just torpedoed one of his main talking points, he angrily denied having gotten any assistance when the question was posed to him in a press scrum outside the White House less than an hour later. “No,” he told reporters as he left Washington for Colorado. “Russia did not help me get elected . . . You know who got me elected? I got me elected. Russia didn’t help me at all.”

Trump’s Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde routine adds to the lack of clarity from the administration about its attitude toward Russian meddling. People like Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats have warned that Russian hackers are still chipping away at the U.S.’s electoral system, even as the president buries his head in the sand. Trump himself has alternated between accepting Russian interference as reality and flat-out denying it, as he did during his infamous summit with Putin in 2018. “He just said it’s not Russia,” Trump told reporters at the time. “I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

While the fact that the leader of the free world is so vain he can’t bring himself to admit he received help, even unwittingly, on his way to the White House, is almost funny, it’s also dangerous. Trump’s fragile ego has reportedly stood in the way of the government’s efforts to prevent future attacks. Fear not, though: 2016 aside, Trump has sworn off foreign help in 2020—not because it’s morally wrong, mind you, but because he’s a big boy who can do the thing himself. “All I need is the opponents I’m looking at,” he said earlier this month, not long after his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, considered asking Ukraine to go after current Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden. “I’m liking what I see.”

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