I thought a remark in “Esquire,” that Trump was going to see Putin for his annual performance review, was funny, until the event. Now, I think it was more like a meeting of Sgt. Raymond Shaw and Dr. Yen Lo to make sure the linkages of the brainwashed Manchurian Candidate were still functioning.

If Trump were the hypnotized or conditioned tool of Putin, he could not have performed more to his master’s liking. Trump found nothing objectionable about Putin’s poisoning of critics, stealing of elections at home and abroad, invading his neighbors, abetting the genocide of Assad or undermining of NATO and Western democracies.

Democrats, a few retiring Republicans, the mainstream press, and even a brace of Fox News stooges were agog. What could explain such aberrant behavior by an American president? But surely this was nothing new. Didn’t we already know that Trump prefers Russia to NATO allies, takes Putin’s word over that of his intelligence services, rambles at every opportunity about obsessions like Hillary’s server and Mueller’s witch hunt?

Perhaps it was a new level of kowtowing to believe it was a dandy idea for Putin to trade help with Mueller’s investigation for a chance for his goons to interrogate American critics of the regime, but a difference of degree, rather than kind. Trump Making America Grovel Again looked a lot like an average day at the office. UnAmerican activities are the new normal for this president.

Still, all the critics of the Helsinki Sell-out ask a good question. What was he thinking? Creative explanations are possible. That he was engaging in a bit of surrealist performance art, or that, if he didn’t play along, he’d be the next nerve gas victim. Maybe that also explains the timorous Republican Congress, but such notions seem too clever by half. Unfortunately, the answers to the Trump conundrum boil down to the familiar, in three large categories.

First, Trump really is a Russian asset. Either he has chosen willingly the side of autocracy over that of democracy. Or, he is an unwilling tool of Putin because the Russians really do have dirt on him — financial chicanery that could put him or his children in prison, embarrassing sexual conduct in living color as alleged in the Steele dossier, or the collusion in stealing the election that he keeps denying so unconvincingly. Any of the above really would qualify as traitorous conduct, if not technically treasonous.

Second, and not mutually exclusive, explanations based on psychological character disorders. These are not out of the question since over two dozen psychiatrists worried that candidate Trump was mentally unfit for office. As we see daily, he is a narcissistic egomaniac who cares only about himself. This makes him uninterested in anything larger, such as duty, honor, country, morality, legality, or his oath of office. His business and amatory careers are full of transgressions of any norm, so long as they served his whim.

Trump’s pathology also requires constant praise and admiration. Despots like Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un have used his neediness to play him like a fiddle. Western leaders like Angela Merkel have been unwilling to join this game, both because it is personally demeaning and because it is politically poisonous. They answer to a democratic electorate liable to be nauseated by their leader bowing to such a creature.

Trump’s short attention span and inability to process data, except emotionally, has also made him an easy mark for fake news, conspiracy theories, and other self-serving fictions, and therefore easily manipulated by Putin or Rupert Murdock or Steve Bannon.

Trump’s horror of being deemed inferior — a loser, weak, impotent — make the idea that he didn’t win a huge victory over Hillary Clinton or that his presidency was tainted by Russian meddling intolerable, literally unthinkable. So he rejects it, and all who suggest it, and any evidence that proves it.

We now know he was briefed days before his inaugural on the full enormity of the plot to subvert our electoral processes. A patriotic American would have surely addressed the American people at once, told them the situation, and outlined the steps he would take to punish the perpetrators and defend the country from further assault.

As we know, Trump has done nothing of the sort for 18 months. Rather he has denied, obfuscated, obstructed, fired investigators, threatened others, and cried “no collusion” and “witch hunt” ad nauseam. If he’s not a guilty party, he certainly gives a world-class imitation of one.

Third, and not incompatible with the first two explanations, is that Trump is a moron. The pundit class doesn’t care for such simplistic explanations. They are always looking for some clever strategy, dark plot, intellectual twist to account for Trump. But Occam’s Razor is still a good place to start. Maybe the simplest explanation is the most likely. in this case, that Trump is a simpleton. Though it may seem impolite to say so, history is littered with men with august titles — President, King, Czar, Caesar, Emperor — who were brainless incompetents.

And in Trump’s case, this has been the private opinion of many of the public servants who have gotten to watch him operate up close. Secretary of State Tillerson was famously quoted as calling his boss “a moron.” Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said Trump was “deplorable.” National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster regarded Trump as “an idiot” and “a dope.” Ditto for General Kelly.

Tom Barrack, close advisor, long-time confidante and fellow billionaire, called Trump “not only crazy-he’s stupid.” Sen. Bob Corker concluded that Trump’s White House was “adult day-care.” National Economic Council director Gary Cohn said this administration was “an idiot surrounded by clowns.” And Steve Bannon said Trump is “like an 11-year-old child.”

So, now that we have several plausible diagnoses for the problem, what do we do about it? Impeachment? Invocation of the 25th Amendment? Replacing a supine Congress with a more active body, if Putin would keep his hands off the next election? Relying on the courts Trump is packing?

Whatever we do, it had better be soon, before Trump can do something worse. He may already have stolen an election, and has begun to shatter our alliances, engage in economic warfare with trading partners, to deny equal justice under law, and to play patty-cake with the world’s tyrants. Still, to paraphrase a Cy Coleman tune, it’s a real good bet, the worst is yet to come.