What did Donald Trump do today?

He moved onto yet another explanation for why the illegal Venezuelan boat attack he ordered wasn't his fault.

To the apparent surprise of the White House, the controversy is continuing to mount over unlawful attacks on survivors of an initial missile strike on suspected Venezuelan drug traffickers. News broke last week that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had verbally ordered two survivors of the Sept. 2nd strike to be killed while they clung to wreckage, which is presumptively murder under United States law and a war crime under international law—and according to the Defense Department itself.

Trump was completely absent from the public eye today, even as questions continued to mount about his health, but his spokesperson Karoline Leavitt issued the third official White House stance in as many days on the attack. Backtracking again from Trump's claim yesterday that neither he nor Hegseth had ordered the killing of survivors, Leavitt admitted the existence of a second strike for the first time. But she insisted that the decision was made by the ranking military officer, Adm. Frank Bradley, and that it was legal for him to have done so.

Pressed on that point, given how clear U.S. law and official Department of Defense doctrine is about killing defenseless people whether or not they are enemy combatants, Leavitt said with a straight face that the second missile strike was done in "self-defense."

In other words, with Congressional investigations already getting underway, Trump is now admitting some of the basic facts of the story that his administration had furiously denied, but setting up the military officer who carried out his orders as the one to bear responsibility.

Trump recently called for sedition trials when Democratic members of Congress pointed out that servicemembers have a duty to disobey illegal orders, and has ordered the FBI to "investigate" them.
 

Why does this matter?

• "We will blame you if it helps us politically" is not a great message for a president to send to American military forces.

• Presidents don't need to be military veterans to be effective commanders-in-chief, but they do have to be capable of understanding why honor and integrity is so important to the United States military. 

• One way to avoid this kind of issue is not to give illegal orders to kill defenseless people in the first place.