What did Donald Trump do today?

Very little, even by his standards.

Trump, who likes to call other people "low energy," is famously removed from the actual work of the presidency. Even in his first term he was usually unable or unwilling to put in a full day of work in the Oval Office, and his visibly declining health and ability to control himself has removed him even further from the day-to-day operation of the White House in his second term. He's even disappeared from public view without explanation for a week at a time. The result has been that, even more often than in his first term, Trump appears to have been kept out of the loop on major decisions that "he" has supposedly made, while competing junior aides dictate policies without any real oversight.

In that sense, today was a fairly typical day in the Trump presidency, in that it was the Saturday of a three-day weekend in which he has no public events scheduled. He went to a Trump-branded golf course, although in keeping with the new normal of his second term, there was no way to know if he actually played golf. The press pool and White House photographers, who were often allowed to take pictures during his rounds, were not even allowed to verify that Trump was actually in the motorcade that went to the course today. (Trump has difficulty walking down stairs or even ramps without assistance, and while he's known to rely on a cart when he does play, even the act of getting up and down from it a hundred times or so would probably be challenging given his other symptoms.) 

Trump's afternoon schedule was similarly opaque: he supposedly had "private meetings" with unspecified visitors. It's not known who, if anyone, he met with, and likely never will be if it was anything other than a social call: Trump revoked a longstanding policy of releasing visitor logs to the public when he first took office.

But he's also been oddly silent on social media today, the one area of public life where he's normally very energetic (and sometimes hypermanic). He posted only twice to his private microblogging site the whole day. One of those posts did make headlines, because rather than a love letter to his third wife Melania, it was a Valentine's Day rant about what amounted to a bad dinner date he'd once had with the alt-conservative talk show host Bill Maher. 

Arguably, Trump complaining about not being treated gently enough by comedians wasn't the most newsworthy part of the 500-word essay that he posted: he also tried to walk back a truly deranged side comment about China's plans to cancel the Stanley Cup (that is, the NHL championship) by economically dominating Canada, which contributes seven of the NHL's 28 teams. In this morning's tirade, Trump reversed course and now claimed that he had

jokingly stated in a TRUTH that, “The first thing China will do is terminate ALL Ice Hockey being played in Canada, and permanently eliminate The Stanley Cup.” Well, he went on and on about the Hockey statement, like “What kind of a person would say such a foolish thing as this,” as though I were being serious when I said it

The post that Trump is referring to came this past Monday, and while people did call it "silly" and "deranged" and "manic," nobody—including Trump's White House staff—called it a joke. It wasn't the first time Trump has said it: a few weeks earlier, he said the same thing to reporters, who didn't take it as a joke then either.

Oh, well, if, if they do a deal with China, yeah, we'll do something very substantial, because we can't, look, I have a great relationship with China presidency, but we don't want China to take over Canada. And if they make the deal that he's looking to make, China will take over Canada. And the first thing they're gonna do, end ice hockey. 

Typically, a president caught making a ridiculous statement in writing that embarrassed him might have the option to blame a staffer, but the Trump White House has already played that card once in the past week.

Why does this matter?

• Trump doing nothing at all might be an improvement, but a president who can't or won't rise to the burdens of the office should resign. 

• Nothing says a president has to be funny, but it's a huge problem when nobody can tell the difference between his "jokes" and his delusions.