After Donald Trump teased a “major statement” about U.S. policy toward Russia, many observers thought the president might actually do something meaningful. They were mistaken: The Republican announced this week that he’d consider new sanctions on Vladimir Putin’s regime unless Russia agreed to a ceasefire with Ukraine — within 50 days.

It was the fifth time Trump had threatened such sanctions, and the first four times, he failed to follow through on his posturing.

In Moscow, where there were at least some concerns that the White House might actually do something meaningful, there was widespread relief in response to the American president’s pitiful position. Indeed, after Trump’s not-so-major announcement, the Russian stock market soared.

It was against this backdrop that the Republican insisted that the former KGB agent never fooled him. HuffPost reported:

President Donald Trump declared Monday that Vladimir Putin has never fooled him, just moments after detailing how the Russian dictator has repeatedly fooled him by having pleasant conversations with him just before launching new attacks against Ukraine to murder innocent civilians.

The rhetorical disconnect was odd, even by his standards. At an Oval Office event, alongside NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, Trump reflected on some of his recent conversations with Putin, explaining: “I speak to him a lot about getting this thing done and I always hang up and say, ‘Well, that was a nice phone call,’ and then missiles launched into Kyiv or some other city.”

Moments later, he added: “I go home, I tell the first lady, ‘You know, I spoke to Vladimir today, we had a wonderful conversation.’ She said, ‘Oh, really? Another city was just hit.’”

Indeed, he’s told variations of this same rhetorical anecdote quite a bit in recent days.

The point was clearly to express criticism: Trump, in his telling, would talk to the Russian leader, who’d say all the right things, filling the American president with confidence. Trump would then deliver assurances to the public about the prospects for peace, only to have Putin turn around and escalate his military offensive in Ukraine.

But as part of this week’s White House event with Rutte, the American president added, in reference to Putin: “He’s fooled a lot of people.” Trump then pointed to each of his modern predecessors.

“He fooled Bush. He fooled a lot of people. He fooled Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden. He didn’t fool me,” Trump boasted.

It’d be great if this were true, but reality proves otherwise.

Trump’s recent rhetorical record is unambiguous. “I believe he wants peace,” Trump said in mid-February, referring to his Russian counterpart. He added, “I mean, I know him very well. Yeah, I think he wants peace. I think he would tell me if he didn’t. … I trust him on this subject.”

Two weeks later, Trump said Putin could be counted on to “keep his word.” Two weeks after that, touting Putin’s alleged interest in peace, Trump declared, “I believe him.” A month later, he told Time magazine he believed that Putin was committed to making peace.

All of those assurances were absurd — at the time and in hindsight — and now, by Trump’s own telling, he’s astonished by the fact that Putin would tell him one thing during a phone meeting, only to do the opposite after hanging up.

But we’re nevertheless all supposed to believe that Putin “didn’t fool” Trump.

Stepping back, there are really only two possibilities here. The first is that Trump wasn’t genuinely fooled, but rather, he was simply lying to the nation and the world about his genuine beliefs regarding Putin. In other words, when the Republican vouched for the Russian autocrat, and insisted he was sincere in his belief that Putin could be trusted to end the war he started, Trump didn’t actually mean a word of it.

The other possibility is that Trump was played for a sucker.

I’ll leave it to the White House to explain which of these possibilities is the accurate one, but there really isn’t a third option.