It was perhaps the most explosive exchange in an incendiary press conference: Russian President Vladimir Putin appearing to frankly admit to a motive for, and maybe even to the act of, meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, despite repeatedly denying Russian interference in American politics during the rest of his appearance with Donald Trump in Finland on Monday.

But the exchange doesn’t appear in full in the White House’s live-stream or transcript of the press conference, and it’s missing entirely from the Kremlin’s transcript of the event. The White House did not immediately provide an explanation for the discrepancy.

Understanding what Putin said depends on what you watch or where you look. If you watch the video of the news conference provided by the Russian government, or by news outlets such as PBS and the Associated Press, you will hear the Reuters reporter Jeff Mason ask a bombshell of a question: “President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election and did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?”

It was AncestryDNA’s customer-service rep who had to break the news to Catherine St Clair.

For her part, St Clair thought she was inquiring about a technical glitch. Her brother—the brother who along with three other siblings had gifted her the DNA test for her birthday—wasn’t showing up right in her family tree. It was not a glitch, the woman on the line had to explain gently, if this news can ever land gently: The man St Clair thought of as her brother only shared enough DNA with her to be a half sibling. In fact, she didn’t match any family members on her father’s side. Her biological father must be someone else.

“I looked into a mirror and started crying,” says St Clair, now 56. “I’ve taken for granted my whole life that what I was looking at in the mirror was part my mother and part my dad. And now that half of that person I was looking at in the mirror, I didn't know who that was.”

Less than 24 hours after an astonishing joint news conference between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, in which Trump sided with Putin over his own intelligence agencies, former President Barack Obama finally did what his supporters have waited for him to do since he left the Oval Office.

He spoke up, forcefully, with a dire warning about the direction of global politics. “I am not being alarmist, I’m simply stating the facts,” Obama said in a closely watched speech in South Africa.

“Look around,” he said. “Strongman politics are ascendant, suddenly, whereby elections and some pretense of democracy are maintained, the form of it, where those in power seek to undermine every institution or norm that gives democracy meaning.”

Nothing matters—until something matters. Helsinki is that something, and it will not stop mattering soon.

In the aftermath, Republican leaders in Congress have felt obliged to state unequivocally that Russia did interfere with the election. But as they speak, they face an uncomfortable problem. Here’s Paul Ryan’s version of that problem. “They did interfere in our elections—it’s really clear. There should be no doubt about that.” Then he immediately added that it was also “clear" that the interference had “no material effect” on the outcome of the election.

But of course, it is not at all clear that the Russian interference had no material effect, just as it’s unclear whether there was active coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. The latest Mueller indictment alleges that the Russians stole Democratic Party voter analytics. Were those analytics shared with the Trump campaign? That remains unclear. Did the Russians and the Trump campaign in any way coordinate the targeting of Facebook and other social-media advertising? That remains unclear. How much Russian money flowed into advertising by third-party groups like the National Rifle Association? Unclear once more.

Trey Gowdy, chair of the House Oversight Committee, issued a statement post-Helsinki: “It is possible to conclude Russia interfered in our election in 2016 without delegitimizing his [President Trump’s] electoral success.” It is possible to do that, but you have to be strongly motivated. The more plausible and more probable conclusion, even before Helsinki, was that the Russian interference shadowed Trump’s legitimacy. Post-Helsinki, the doubts rankle even more sharply.

Plainly, there is something wrong in the Trump-Russia relationship. Plainly, it governs Trump’s behavior. Plainly, Trump refuses to do those things—release his tax returns, for example—that might clarify his financial obligations to Russian sources.

Republicans want to argue that Russia did something wrong to influence the election’s outcome, while rebuffing questions about whether the outcome of the election was wrongly influenced. This is not a sustainable position, something Trump has recognized more clearly than most of his followers.

So here we are: More and more people—including the highest-ranking former intelligence officers—surmise that Russia has an improper hold upon the American president. That president refuses to comply with long-established norms of financial disclosure. The Russians interfered in the election intentionally to help the current president, as Putin explicitly acknowledged in Helsinki. They broke American law, victimized individual Americans, and stole valuable proprietary information from an American political party. Did they share that information with the winner of the election? His party keeps attempting to obstruct the investigation of the information theft and to besmirch and discredit those doing the investigating.

Donald Trump is a natural-born citizen over the age of 35. Under the rules in place at the time, he received sufficient electoral votes to secure the presidency. American law does not provide for presidential election do-overs no matter what wrongs a candidate is revealed after the fact to have committed. Trump is the lawful president, but legitimacy is not decided by technicalities.

There are exactly two possible explanations for the shameful performance the world witnessed on Monday, from a serving American president.

Either Donald Trump is flat-out an agent of Russian interests—maybe witting, maybe unwitting, from fear of blackmail, in hope of future deals, out of manly respect for Vladimir Putin, out of gratitude for Russia’s help during the election, out of pathetic inability to see beyond his 306 electoral votes. Whatever the exact mixture of motives might be, it doesn’t really matter.

Or he is so profoundly ignorant, insecure, and narcissistic that he did not  realize that, at every step, he was advancing the line that Putin hoped he would advance, and the line that the American intelligence, defense, and law-enforcement agencies most dreaded.

Whether President Trump is a Manchurian candidate—cultivated for leadership here by an enemy nation to damage our country—or simply feckless is almost irrelevant at this point. It would be satisfying to know, but immaterial, given the president’s behavior. Trump’s actions, even if motivated by ill-founded concepts or desperate self-preservation rather than allegiance to a hostile foreign power, are deeply injurious to the welfare of the United States.

Rather than confronting Vladimir Putin for interfering in the 2016 election, Trump gave the Russian leader’s professions of innocence the same weight as the unanimous conclusion of American intelligence agencies: “President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” The charge of Russian malfeasance had been reiterated by Dan Coats the previous day, and was repeated again by the director of national intelligence after the alarming press conference featuring Trump and Putin: “We have been clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and their ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy, and we will continue to provide unvarnished and objective intelligence in support of our national security.” Trump received that information in advance of the Putin meeting not only from Coats, but also from the Justice Department, which briefed him on the Mueller indictments before their issuance.

Updated at 4:01 p.m. ET

Facing one of the biggest controversies of his tumultuous presidency, Donald Trump on Tuesday tried to clean up his remarks during a press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday.

Contradicting his prior comments, Trump said he accepts, with caveats, the American conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. After saying in Helsinki that he saw no reason why Russia would have been behind the hacking, he claimed Tuesday afternoon that he intended to say he saw no reason why Russia wouldn’t be the culprit. But he also insisted that relations between the United States and Russia are improving, and reiterated his claim that there was no collusion between his campaign and Russians.

HELSINKI—After weeks of frantic preparations and buildup, the world’s spotlight has come to Finland and gone, leaving behind controversy and confusion. U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s flashy one-day meeting on Monday brought an international frenzy to the normally calm Finnish capital, culminating in a bizarre press conference that has left experts and commentators shell-shocked and declaring a symbolic victory for Russia. It was a disorienting and surreal conclusion to a diplomatic event that emphasized showmanship over substance from the beginning.

The tone for what was to come was set early in the day on Monday. Before meeting with Putin, Trump tweeted that the poor state of U.S.-Russia relations was the fault of “many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!,” referring to Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian meddling in American politics. Obviously enthused, the Russian Foreign Ministry tweeted “We agree,” in response. Next, in a common power move used by the Russian president, Putin landed in Helsinki one hour late and zipped off the tarmac in his newly made Russian limousine as Trump waited with Finnish President Sauli Niinistö at the presidential palace and the TV cameras followed his motorcade through a cordoned-off Helsinki. Later, Putin emerged clearly satisfied after a roughly two-hour-long unrecorded one-on-one meeting with Trump and working lunch. Speaking to a packed room of attentive reporters, the two leaders failed to offer any concrete outcomes from their meeting, despite weeks of speculation over potential deals on Syria, Ukraine, and nuclear weapons. Still, Trump was eager to play up the spectacle of the event one last time. “Our relationship has never been worse than it is now,” he said early in the press conference before taking a dramatic pause. “However, that changed as of about four hours ago. I really believe that."

The United States is one country, but Americans are living in two separate worlds.

In one version of America, the country is headed in the totally wrong direction. Billionaires control politics. Foreign governments meddle in elections. And not enough people vote to demand a change.

In the other America, things are looking up, particularly with a good president in office. But some civic functions are still broken—especially the media, which is politically biased against certain candidates.

Americans having divergent views on the health of their country’s democracy isn’t a recent development. But a new survey, co-created by The Atlantic and the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), suggests that they have become radically split in their basic perceptions of reality, especially on controversial topics such as Russian interference in the 2016 election. “We only have the thinnest of agreements of what is plaguing our election system,” said Robert P. Jones, the head of PRRI. “After that, people are viewing whatever problems they see very strongly through their partisan lenses.”

We still do not know what hold Vladimir Putin has on Donald Trump, but the whole world has now witnessed the power of its grip.

Russia helped Donald Trump into the presidency, as Robert Mueller’s indictment vividly details. Putin, in his own voice, has confirmed that he wanted Trump elected. Standing alongside his benefactor, Trump denounced the special counsel investigating Russian intervention in the U.S. election—and even repudiated his own intelligence appointees.

This is an unprecedented situation, but not an uncontemplated one. At the 1787 convention in Philadelphia, the authors of the Constitution worried a great deal about foreign potentates corrupting the American presidency.

When Gouverneur Morris famously changed his mind in favor of an impeachment clause, he explained his new point of view by invoking a situation very similar to the one now facing the United States: