What did Donald Trump do today?

He said he didn't know what his administration was on immigration policy, which may be true.

In an Oval Office press availability today, Trump was asked about reports that he has struck a deal with the de facto government of Libya to accept deportees from several southeast Asian countries. Trump's answer, in its entirety, was:

I don't know. You'll have to ask Homeland Security, please.

Arrangements like this with "third-party countries" have happened, but—Trump's misadventures in El Salvador aside—they are rare and usually limited to situations where the host country is stable and culturally similar to the one the deportees are from. Libya is a failed state with a horrendous human rights record, with both sides in a recent civil war preparing to renew hostilities. As Amnesty International reports, refugees and migrants there have been "subjected to torture, sexual violence and forced labor."

Trump's claim that he doesn't know whether these reports are true can be interpreted one of three ways. The most obvious, and in some ways the most optimistic, is that Trump is simply lying: he does know, but wants people to think he doesn't, because he doesn't want to draw more attention to his increasingly unpopular handling of immigration. 

Another possibility is that he doesn't know because he wasn't told. This is also entirely consistent with Trump's tenure in the White House, where keeping things from him was so common that staffers would tell the press they were doing it. Just yesterday, his administration leaked that Trump had supposedly been kept in the dark for months by his Secretary of Defense as he pursued a rogue foreign policy on Ukraine without Trump's permission.

Finally, Trump may be telling the truth that he doesn't know about his administration's arrangements with Libya despite having been told. Trump is known to blow off his daily intelligence briefing, and to have trouble focusing on it without help from his staff to make it more interesting. And his erratic behavior over the past ten years or so has certainly led to a great deal of speculation about his basic cognitive fitness.

Why does this matter?

• It's very bad if "the president is lying to the American people" is the best possible option.
  

• The presidency is a full-time job, and people who find it too taxing should resign.