“What the hell happened to him?” That was President Trump’s ostensibly nonplussed reaction to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s acting exactly as Vladimir Putin has acted since coming to global attention over a quarter century ago. “He’s killing a lot of people,” the president added. Well . . . yeah.

I find it impossible to believe that the president is surprised that a war criminal is committing war crimes. But hey, I also found it impossible to believe that the president really thought that the Democrats’ Russiagate smear — i.e., that Trump was a clandestine agent of the Kremlin — was this miserable bonding experience that he and Putin went through together, as opposed to something that deeply divided the American public and paralyzed Washington, much to the delight of Putin, a committed enemy of the United States who thrives on our internal conflicts.

As I said in the weekend column, I don’t know what the president thinks, and I believe he thinks different, contradictory things at different times. But if he actually envisions himself and Putin as kindred spirits mutually admiring of each other — as opposed to just spouting what he knows is drivel to try (however ineffectively) to beguile Putin while making Trump detractors nuts — then that would be scary.

I’d like to continue thinking that Trump doesn’t believe what he says about Putin, even if the eight-dimensional chess rationalizations of his commentary are risible. On the other hand, today the president asserted, “What Vladimir Putin doesn’t realize is that if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD.”  To the contrary, Putin realizes this precisely.

Of course, the salient question is what President Trump realizes. I have no idea what the answer is. Again, I can’t believe he’s this obtuse, but some of his Putin commentary is so detached from reality that it’s hard to fathom an American president’s believing its utterance is a helpful part of some master plan.

While Trump has groused that Putin may have been “tapping me along” regarding a cease-fire in Ukraine, I argued over the weekend that Putin has never wavered about his intentions to conquer Ukraine; it’s been the president who has tapped the American people along, claiming to have a plan to end the war when, in fact, there has never been a plan. Much as I hate to say this, that’s the best-case scenario. I can’t discount the far worse possibility that President Trump has believed his Putin-sympathetic nonsense and is genuinely surprised by how things have unfolded.