Why is President Donald Trump defending Russia so vehemently?

At his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week in Helsinki, Finland, Trump stated in an interview that he believed Putin’s assertions that Russia did not meddle in the 2016 presidential election.

Let me rephrase that. Standing on foreign soil, our president stated that he believed the words of the criminal leader of a hostile power over hard evidence presented to him by his own intelligence services.

There was almost immediately a bipartisan outcry. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stated that there is “indisputable” evidence that Russia tried to affect the 2016 election. Senator Kamala Harris lamented that Trump “invited” Putin to attack us again. Other officials, from House Speaker Paul Ryan to former CIA director John Brennan, spoke out against Trump’s actions.

Even more concerning is the German response to yesterday’s events. Heiko Maas, Germany’s foreign minister, addressed the situation in no uncertain terms.

“We can no longer completely rely on the White House,” Maas said.

In addition, a YouGov poll asking respondents whether Trump or Putin was the bigger threat to world security showed that 64 percent of Germans chose Trump, with only 16 percent choosing Putin.

Trump’s attempts at damage control have been incomprehensible.

“As I said today and many times before, ‘I have GREAT confidence in MY intelligence people,'” he tweeted soon after the summit. “However, I also recognize that in order to build a brighter future, we cannot exclusively focus on the past – as the world’s two largest nuclear powers, we must get along!”

He would let Russia spit on our faces, and then apologize for it.

Today, Trump backtracked on his statements, stating that it was a mere slip of the tongue. Even if you ignore the fact that the new version makes no sense in context, former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci — who says he still considers himself loyal to Trump — had some damning words.

“This is not a mistake of words, by the way, this is not a bad PR kerfuffle. This is a mistake of strategy and execution. This is a mistake of thinking, and you have your ego involved,” Scaramucci said.

Even worse, Trump made further statements attempting to absolve Russia of blame.

“[It] could be other people also. A lot of people out there,” Trump said reading off a sheet of paper.

These assertions are not backed by any evidence or findings from American intelligence agencies.

So why is Trump going out of his way to try and protect Russia?

The answer, as Scaramucci said, is simple. It’s because he is afraid that people will discover that his election victory was illegitimate.

The pieces are all in place. The role of White House cyber coordinator, which is the role responsible for coordinating American cyber defenses, has been eliminated.

The Department of Homeland Security and the President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council have raised concerns about the vulnerability of critical American infrastructure. However, Trump never formed a commission or any kind of investigative body to analyze and learn from the 2016 experience.

Putin openly said he wanted Trump to win the 2016 election.

The fact is, Trump is deathly afraid that investigators, whether it is special counsel Robert Mueller or others, will discover evidence that Putin landed him in the White House and is continuing to play him like a fiddle. He needs to realize that, in the words of Speaker Ryan, “Russia is not our ally.”

The damage he has done to American foreign affairs is, quite honestly, incalculable. The vast majority of his foreign policy has been characterized with words like “misstep,” “step back” and “blunder,” amongst others.

Mueller hasn’t come out with concrete evidence of collusion yet, but it doesn’t matter whether there was any collusion or not. If Trump benefitted at all from Russian interference, he needs to step aside.

If it is proven that Putin put Trump in office, it is absolutely unfathomable that Trump would stay there and continue to dance on Russian strings — whether Trump knows about them or not. If Putin, the ex-KGB agent and dictator, in all but name, is allowed to exert that much control over the “leader of the free world,” we can bid farewell to Western democracy.

It’s time for Trump to face the music.