In Trump’s campaign for the presidency, by contrast, the Russian romance was not only out in the open, it was a deliberate selling point, which the candidate himself consistently brought up and emphasized and touted. Any American voter who paid attention knew that Trump was a Russia dove, that he intended to seek a détente with Moscow, that he wanted to make some sort of Great Deal with Vladimir Putin and inaugurate a new era of great power cooperation. He won the Republican primary on that position. He won the Electoral College on that position. The public had every reason to understand that he was unusually pro-Russia, and in the necessary numbers they voted for him anyway.

Now it may be, as many postelection commentaries have argued, that the public was underinformed about the various connections between Trump’s campaign staff and Russia’s oligarchic-intelligence complex, and that a thorough airing of Trumpworld’s ties would have made his pro-détente rhetoric seem more sinister.

But the fact remains that Trump told us, over and over again, that he liked the idea of improving relations with Russia — an idea, as it happens, that this man of few consistent ideas has held consistently since the armaggedon-haunted 1980s. He was forthright, not deceptive. He did not act like a man with a dark secret, a man for whom Russia was a dangerous subject to be avoided at all costs, a man with an interest in turning the public’s attention away from anything related to the Kremlin. He was happy to talk about Putin, happy to wear his Russophilic intentions on his sleeve.

This does not make it impossible to believe, as an increasing number of Trump critics do these days, that Trump’s inner circle was actually colluding with Russian intelligence during this period — or that Trump himself, for reasons financial or personal, was really a Russian asset of some sort. Our president is sufficiently undisciplined and self-sabotaging, sufficiently incapable of normal self-interested self-control, that you cannot dismiss the possibility that his public rhetoric on Russia was effectively a weird sort of advertisement for crimes or blackmail being perpetrated behind the scenes.