To appreciate the dramatic shift in President Donald Trump’s policy towards Ukraine, consider two scenes in the Oval Office, months apart:

The way to get a peace agreement is to change the battlefield.

This is one of Trump’s favorite rhetorical tics —the conjuring up of a mythical community (“people are saying”) that agrees wholeheartedly with some highly questionable assertion. Who are these people who were surprised by Putin’s lies and obfuscations about the war?