In the fall of 2012, I was in Moscow, at the embassy of a small Middle Eastern country. I was writing an article for The New York Times Magazine about an oligarch in Baku who wanted to build the tallest skyscraper in the world. I had been told the ambassador and the oligarch had met in the ‘90s at a cocktail party in London and were friends, sort of. The ambassador served sugar cookies and very strong coffee in miniature porcelain cups, which is what they serve when you interview ambassadors, from the Middle East and elsewhere. He had a kindly gaze and gravelly baritone. He was well tailored. Naturally, he spoke with an Oxbridge lilt. He seemed more like a caricature of an ambassador than an ambassador. He asked me who was going to win the election in America. I told him I had no idea. It was raining in Moscow, and the price of a barrel of oil was still north of $100. For 10 or 15 minutes, the ambassador spouted platitudes about the new global order, Obama, Putin, the Turks, the Azeris, a pipeline, someone he’d met at Davos, his favorite soccer team. He quoted Metternich at least once. Finally, he said, May we transition to—how do you say?—deep background?, which seemed a funny way of saying, Can I be honest with you? I nodded, and he said, About America, I want to say something: Every four or eight years, you elect a new president, and the president is like a virgin who must be educated in, you can say, the world. We like America because you are friendly and believe in nice things, but the Russians understand how the world works.

The caricature of the artless American, like that of the ambassador, has its basis in truth. The first three American presidents of the post-Cold War era were propelled by a sometimes unsophisticated vision of how the world ought to be; they made deals or assumptions they shouldn’t have, but they also tinkered and toiled behind the scenes. They trusted, and they verified. On balance, they were not as adept at handling the Russians as their predecessors were with the Soviets, but they were not a disaster. Now, with the election of Donald Trump, the tone has shifted, and the basic assumptions—about the competence of our elected officials and the things they might say to their counterparts in Moscow—feel misplaced. Who invites Russian officials into the Oval Office and accidentally discloses top-secret Israeli intelligence? Who engages in a tête-à-tête with the Russian president without his own interpreter, without someone to make sure America is not getting played? Suddenly, the caricature feels less like a perversion or elongation of the truth than a terrifying new reality.

The guilelessness of the Trump campaign has already yielded enough scandals to keep the intelligence community busy for years. Take, for example, Donald Trump Jr.’s June 9 meeting at Trump Tower, which has all the trappings of an intelligence operation. There was, alongside Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, a Russian lawyer, who was said to have compromising information about Hillary Clinton but allegedly only wanted to talk about the Magnitsky Act and the issue of Russian adoption. There was an alleged ex-Soviet spy, Rinat Akhmetshin, who works as a Russian-American lobbyist, and, representing the Russian oligarch who orchestrated the meeting, Irakly Kaveladze, who has been accused by congressional investigators of a scheme to launder $1.4 billion of Russian and Eastern European money through U.S. banks. (Kaveladze, who said he attended to serve as a translator, has denied allegations of any wrongdoing.) Trump Jr. has said that “no details or supporting information” about Clinton were ever actually offered, and that the lawyer “had no meaningful information.”

Video: The Trump Administration’s Ties to Russia

It’s hardly the spycraft of le Carré, or even of Clancy. Even so, the Russians must have been astounded at the ham-fisted ways in which the Trump campaign sought to leverage its relationship with Moscow, and the clumsy attempts to cover its tracks afterward—all of which has made it virtually impossible for the White House, as Trump has conceded, to actually build stronger ties with Russia. Trump has said of the alleged interference in the 2016 election that if Putin “did do it, you wouldn’t have found out about it.” It’s hard to say the same of the Trumps, for whom former C.I.A. director John Brennan’s warning that “frequently, people who go along a treasonous path do not know they are on a treasonous path until it is too late” may yet serve a fitting epitaph.

One wonders: are they really that dumb? Are they really so easily manipulated? Perhaps more important, are the Russians really so much better at espionage and counterintelligence that they could successfully infiltrate a presidential campaign, meddle in an American election, and hope to get away with it?