What a sublime pleasure it was to turn on the TV and see a President of the United States standing tall for his country instead of betraying it. Indeed, any numbskull who still thinks voting doesn’t matter should be compelled to contrast the Helsinki summit of July ’18 with the Helsinki sitdown of July ’23.

Five summers ago, Donald Trump sucked up to Vladimir Putin, his Russian master; in the apt words of John McCain, “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.” But what we got yesterday was the polar opposite. President Biden welcomed Finland and Sweden to the strengthened NATO alliance and tore the tyrant a new one:

“When Putin and his craven lust for land and power unleashed his brutal war on Ukraine, he was betting NATO would break apart. He thought our unity would shatter at the first testing. He thought democratic leaders would be weak. But he thought wrong…(T)here is no possibility of him winning the war in Ukraine. He’s already lost that war.”

Granted, big questions remain: How and when might this war end? Are most Americans as willing as Biden to send money and weapons, on an open-ended basis, to heroic Ukraine? But those are the kinds of issues that test any normal president – as opposed to a toadying “president” who was determined, in front of the entire world, to run his tongue across Putin’s shoes.

Dare we revisit what happened in Helsinki on that blessedly now-distant July day? Trump met privately with Putin for two hours, in the presence of only their translators. We still don’t know what was said, what agreements they may have forged, or whether the translators took notes. (Historian Michael Beschloss plaintively tweeted this week, “When do we historians and all Americans get to see the secret record of what Trump and Putin told each other in private in Helsinki and at other meetings?”) But that secret session aside, what later happened later in public was bad enough.

By the summer of ’18, it was established fact, as confirmed by a consensus of the U.S. intelligence community, that Putin’s cyber-operatives had invaded the 2016 president election on Trump’s behalf. But at a Helsinki press conference, when Trump was asked whether he believed his own intelligence community, he instead sided with Putin. Putin had denied involvement, and that was good enough for him. With Putin virtually at his elbow, he declared: “(Putin) just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be…I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”

A day later, back in Washington, he tried to clean things up by praising the intelligence community, conceding that, yeah, maybe Russia did meddle in 2016, but then he improvised a caveat about who else it might’ve been – “Could be other people also, there’s a lot of people out there” – which prompted jokes on social media that Trump was poised to resurrect his imaginary culprit, a 400-pound couch potato hacker.

By the way, earlier this week, Trump declared on his social media site that he still trusts Putin more than our “intelligence lowlifes” and “misfits.” This guy makes weaklings look like Popeye.

Sadly, he’s joined by a sizable share of the House’s MAGA cadre, 70 of whom voted this week -in vain – to cut off all American aid to Ukraine. Biden has assessed them correctly. In Helsinki, he told a Finnish reporter that America’s leadership of a strengthened NATO will be sustained: “There’s always support from the members of Congress, both House and Senate, in both parties – notwithstanding some extreme elements of one party.”

How fortunate we are right now to have a real president, not a Putin groupie. With Biden holding firm as leader of the western alliance, the Russian despot has no choice but to hope for a Trump restoration in 2025, or maybe the election of the governor of DeSantistan, who has dismissed Putin’s invasion of as merely a “territorial dispute.”

For America, it’s a stark choice between Biden’s strength and MAGA weakness. Will we be a reliable ally for Ukraine and for an expanded NATO? Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, frames the bottom line: “It will matter who is the next President of the United States.”