The embattled president, who has been fighting to defend the legitimacy of his election ever since losing the popular vote to Hilary Clinton by two per cent in 2016, was never going to do anything to weaken his own position.

For Trump to have confronted Putin over Russia's now well-documented intervention in that poll, thereby raising the possibility he was not the legitimately elected president, would have run directly counter to his own interests.

The one thing we have definitely learnt about this man over the past 18 months is he never does anything that weakens his own position or leaves himself exposed. Self-interest, mixed with an extremely largely dose of pragmatism, is the President's guiding star.

This apparent belief that "what's good for Donald Trump is good for the country" has made him easy to read on the one hand, and very hard to manage on the other.

More orthodox political operators, including Hilary Clinton, John McCain, Kim Jong-un and even, as we have just seen, Vladimir Putin, are at a profound disadvantage in that they usually feel obligated to stick to an ideological or party line and pay at least some lip service to the demands of their various positions.

Trump, who appears to be genuinely unable to differentiate between his own interests and his responsibilities as America's head of state, is not bound by such constraints. He is capable of dramatically changing his position on serious policy questions within the space of three tweets and 15 minutes; an ability he demonstrated with his comments about Teresa May and Brexit last week.

That is why, while the rest of us are amazed an American president would choose to take the word of a dictator over the combined heads of his own intelligence agencies on the crucial question of whether or not Russia fixed the presidential election, he doesn't have a problem.

Yes, what Trump said after the summit is apparently a win for Putin and has drawn attention away from last week's indictment of 12 Russians for allegedly hacking and leaking Democratic campaign emails; but it is also a win for Trump who has a lot more skin in this particular game than the Russians.

If and when the case against the Russians is made, and the results of the election are called into question, what has Putin lost? Absolutely nothing. He will actually have successfully undermined public confidence in the single most important democratic institution of the United States.

Trump, on the other hand, will be exposed as a political chancer who probably wouldn't have won if it hadn't been for underhanded activities in which his team may, or may not, have been involved.

Putin's denials, which will be embraced by many, if not all, of Trump's true believers, actually benefit the U.S. President to a far greater extent than whatever good his acceptance of them might do the Russian leader in the longer term.