During his presidency, former President Ronald Reagan adopted an old Russian proverb for his own use. “Trust, but verify” is how it translated to English, and Reagan used it to signify his relationship with the Soviet Union.

He also used it because Russians love a good proverb.

However, with reports coming out that Donald Trump accepted President Vladimir Putin’s claim he did not interfere with our democratic election during their meeting at the G20 summit, it seems the U.S. is now operating under a much different motto. We are now in the time of “Trust, and never verify.”

Take a moment to absorb the fact that Donald Trump trusts Putin over our entire intelligence community. Ronald Reagan must be spinning in his grave.

One way in which Trump has tried to deride the intelligence community is by pointing out how badly it failed when it got us into the Iraq War over weapons of mass destruction that were never there. The only problem with that argument is it’s completely wrong. The intelligence community did not get us into the Iraq War — Bush and his cronies did. Some in the intelligence community believed Saddam Hussein may have had weapons of mass destruction, but the Bush administration took that and other bits and pieces of intelligence and told the American people they were positive he had WMDs. They lied us into war.

Our entire intelligence community agrees that Russia hacked the Democrats during the 2016 election. Trump likes to say it’s almost impossible to figure out who hacked you unless you catch them in the act, but that’s not true. “The whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what is going on,” Trump once said about the hacking, showing his technological prowess. It is Trump who does not know what is going on, but our intelligence community seemingly does, and this is another example of Trump refusing to defer to the experts. He’d rather consult the greatest expert he’s ever met, regardless of the topic: Himself.

(Kremlin)

The fact of the matter is this: Trump can’t believe the intelligence community. This is the problem with having a megalomaniac in the Oval Office. For Trump to accept what the intelligence community is telling him, he would have to accept that maybe he wouldn’t have won the election without Russian interference, and his large but fragile ego cannot take such a blow. Trump sees himself as a winner and a self-made man, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, and he will not hear that he could have lost if an outside force hadn’t rigged the game for him.

The danger this situation puts the United States in is difficult to overstate. As many experts have noted, if Trump and Congress don’t do something about Russian election interference, it’s going to keep happening. We might as well tear up the Constitution at that point.

Furthermore, Trump putting this much trust in Putin has other consequences. It was reported on July 7 that many nuclear reactors in the United States have been hacked, and it is believed that Russia is behind this. Considering what Russia was able to do to Ukraine’s power grid through hacking, this should be disturbing to everyone. Putin may be prepping for a massive cyberattack that could disrupt large regions of the country.

All of this is not to say we should be antagonizing Russia every chance we get. Those who are saying we need to have a working relationship with Russia are correct in some ways. We need to be talking to Russia about military actions in Syria and many other issues, but that doesn’t mean we need to blindly trust Putin and act like he has our best interests at heart. Putin is a major threat, both to the United States and our European allies, and the president must recognize that. It’s hard to imagine this happening while Trump is president, considering he has already sanitized Putin’s history of killing his political rivals. Perhaps he’s not the one who should do it.

We are facing a situation where the president of the United States consistently puts himself and his delusional view of the world ahead of the interests of the nation. Instead of accepting the conclusions of our intelligence community, Trump would rather protect his image and cozy up with a violent authoritarian. This is not patriotic, and it is not acceptable behavior for a president. If we don’t act now, there could be grave outcomes in the near future.