Even as the media, and all of Washington, buzzed with scandalous uncorroborated claims about President-elect Donald Trump’s ties to the Kremlin, a lesser-noticed moment neatly illustrated another side of Trump’s—or Trump-era conservatism’s—Russia problem. After Marco Rubio grilled Rex Tillerson at his confirmation hearings about the secretary of state nominee’s refusal to call Vladimir Putin a war criminal, Trump’s Twitter legion attacked the Republican senator. High -profile Trump supporters mocked Rubio, sometimes crudely, with some followers insisting that if the Russian president is a war criminal, Barack Obama is too.

Since the election, some of the left’s rhetoric declaring Trump the Kremlin’s “Manchurian candidate” has bordered on unhinged, while many of the president-elect’s defenders have argued the benefits of rapport with the Putin regime. But whatever the facts may be about the Kremlin connection, Trump’s stance on Russia is a genuine cause for concern—as is the drift in the pro-Trump quarters of the right toward rose-colored perceptions of Putin.