After speaking together in Vietnam, President Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin seem to have reached an accord over the 2016 elections.

Despite all the evidence and the testimony of the United States intelligence community, Trump says he absolutely believes Putin when Putin says he didn’t try to meddle in the election.

Mr. Trump told reporters traveling with him after a series of talks with Mr. Putin on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting in Vietnam: “Every time he sees me he says, ‘I didn’t do that,’ and I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it. He says, ‘I didn’t do that.’ I think he is very insulted by it, which is not a good thing for our country.” Mr. Trump did not answer a direct question about whether he believed Mr. Putin’s denials, which contradict the assessment of American intelligence agencies that the Russian president had directed an elaborate effort to interfere in the vote. Mr. Trump also said that the continued focus on whether his campaign aides had worked with Russian operatives to sway the election was souring Washington’s relationship with Moscow and was blocking progress on vital security issues, such as confronting the nuclear threat from North Korea and ending the Syrian civil war.

Okay.

That’s, um, cool and all, but are we really just going to ignore the evidence? It’s not really a good look for a U.S. president to be actively ignoring/slamming/contradicting his own intelligence community’s information. What’s worse, is that no one was really pushing the idea that Russia is the sole reason Trump won anymore.

Sure, there are investigations into what Trump’s campaign was talking to Russia about, but there is still no evidence that Trump himself did anything. Every time he opens his mouth with a denial or anything like that, he’s just fueling a fire of his own making, and leading people to believe that there is still a there there.

However, most importantly, it’s a bad idea for Trump to be siding with Putin, when Russia has a very long history of trying to mess with the rest of the world, the U.S. and its allies in Europe, included. Why on earth would he think that Russia wasn’t trying to do something to screw with us now?

Did Putin use the puppy dog eyes? I bet he used the puppy dog eyes.