The frantic conversations over what to do began on the flight home. While the president groused about the difficulty of the questions posed to him by American journalists, John R. Bolton, the national security adviser, mostly stayed away from Mr. Trump.

Mr. Bolton wrote down four bullet points aboard Air Force One that he believed were relevant, including that Mr. Trump should acknowledge that he believed the intelligence agencies’ findings on the Russian meddling. He relayed them to the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, although it was unclear whether the suggestions were delivered to the president.

On the plane, Mr. Trump’s mood vacillated from snappish to upbeat. He asked advisers once again about the Democratic National Committee server that was hacked (he had raised the server issue while standing next to Mr. Putin), and why cyberintruders had not penetrated Republican National Committee systems.

In the days since arriving back home, Mr. Trump has surveyed almost everyone he has talked to about his performance in Finland, but few told him just how poorly it had gone. Aides suggested different options for “changing the narrative,” without seeming to realize that a simple story would not suffice.

Mr. Trump ultimately came up with his own solution: He would say he had left out a word in the news conference with Mr. Putin. “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia,’” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday, trying to clear up the confusion but heaping on more. “Sort of a double negative.”

When it was clear that the news cycle had not jumped ahead, Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka looked for ways to push the narrative away from Russia. On Thursday morning, at a senior staff meeting, Ms. Trump, a senior adviser to the president, told the group that she wanted help keeping her father on message, according to a person briefed on what took place. She said her worker retraining announcement with her father later in the afternoon at the White House could provide a pivot toward a new story.

Once she finished talking, the president’s counselor, Kellyanne Conway, pointed out that Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, and two other administration intelligence officials would appear at a national security conference in Aspen, Colo., noting that it could become another day of coverage about Russia. John F. Kelly, the chief of staff, resumed the meeting without addressing the issue. No one else suggested a plan of attack either.