There’s a phrase for when someone “misspeaks” so often about the same sore subject: It’s what he actually believes.

And on Wednesday, he made that plain. Asked point-blank, “Is Russia still targeting the U.S.?” he answered, “No.”

It’s hard to wrap our heads around just how dangerous Trump’s refusal to believe the truth about Russia’s information-warfare campaign is. For two years now, American intelligence agencies have been warning about Russia’s unprecedented efforts to sow mistrust and undermine American democracy in the 2016 election and beyond. They have never wavered. We now know that intelligence agencies first became concerned in the summer of 2016 and briefed senior Obama administration officials. In October, before the election, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and then-Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson issued a public statement formally announcing that the Russian government was attempting “to interfere with the U.S. election process.”

In January 2017, the intelligence community went further, declassifying a report by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and director of national intelligence called, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections.” It used strong language, concluding with “high confidence” that “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

All of the evidence publicly released since then—including Russia’s well-orchestrated social-media campaign using Facebook, Google, and Twitter, which reached over 100 million Americans; the annual intelligence threat assessment; and the special counsel’s indictments of 26 Russian nationals for their involvement in cyberhacking and election interference—has pointed in one direction: Russia. This is no Iraq weapons of mass destruction moment, where time revealed that intelligence judgments were wrong and the threat wasn’t what we thought it was. It is a Cuban missile crisis moment—where time is revealing that the threat is actually far worse, and more imminent, than we originally believed. Today, there should be no question that Russia poses a threat to American democracy and security. The only question is what American leaders are going to do about it. Even Trump’s own intelligence-agency heads have made clear, despite intense political pressure from the president to soft pedal and back pedal, that they concur with the assessment of their agencies and that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is not the “witch hunt” the president claims. Just hours after Trump’s summit remarks, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats came out of the shadows to release an unusual public statement. It pushed back, hard: “We have been clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and their ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy,” Coats said.