Donald Trump is not consistent on many things, but he always sticks by Vladimir Putin. Even when forced to concede that Putin might have done something bad, such as ordering murder, he qualifies it.

Like fellow-traveller Leftists of the 1970s, he goes in for bogus moral equivalence (“Well, I think our country does plenty of killing”). Hillary Clinton, he said in the TV debate on Wednesday, is a “nasty woman”. But the fact that Mr Putin is a nasty man seems to hold a sort of allure for Mr Trump. Putin “outsmarts” Mrs Clinton, he jibes.