What did Donald Trump do today?

He said he knew nothing about a botched US mission in North Korea—which, horrifyingly, may be true.

The New York Times today ran a detailed exposé of a failed American military operation on North Korea in 2019. Backed by dozens of sources, it described a risky attempt by a Navy SEAL team to plant an electronic listening device inside North Korea. The mission was aborted when the team was accidentally discovered by North Korean fishermen. Desperate to avoid alerting the North Korean military to their presence, the team opened fire and killed the fishermen, hid their bodies, and escaped.

The mission had never before been made public—or even shared with Congress, which is a major breach of law and protocol.

According to the sources in the NYT article, North Korea's military surged into the area immediately after the team withdrew, strongly suggesting that the government of North Korea knew it had been attacked, and probably why and by whom. That meant that, within days or hours of the mission being aborted, the only people Trump was keeping it a secret from were Americans.

Asked about it today, Trump replied, "I don't know anything about it. I'm hearing it now for the first time." This is, in its own way, almost as shocking as the story itself.

The best-case scenario is that Trump is simply lying: he does remember authorizing the operation, but doesn't want to take the blame for its failure or his own refusal to inform Americans' representatives in Congress. 

But this is not the only possibility. Another is that Trump, who is now 79 and was 72 at the time, genuinely cannot remember the total failure of a high-stakes military operation from his first term. Trump, whose cognitive fitness has been a concern since he first took office, frequently imagines, misremembers, forgets, or confabulates events from the past.

Another possibility, less likely but impossible to rule out, is that Trump can't remember the operation because he was never properly informed of it—even though it was about an operation that would have required a president's approval under normal circumstances. Trump is famously easily cut out of the loop by his own staff as they try to manage him. Sometimes this is for trivial reasons, as when staffers had a Navy ship named after his political enemy John McCain moved from his line of sight to head off a temper tantrum. But Trump has also let himself be sidelined on critical matters: just this year, for example, his own Secretary of Defense has twice overruled Trump's policy on military aid to Ukraine without informing him.

In related news, the Trump administration announced today that they would not be allowing Congress to learn anything about its current or future military operations against Venezuela.

Why does this matter?

• Every single explanation for Trump claiming not to know what happened on his first watch is grounds for removal from office, either by impeachment or because he is mentally incompetent. 

• In a democracy, presidents are not kings, and they are not military dictators either.