What did Donald Trump do today?

He said it was no big deal that his CIA director got caught on a secret trip to Russia.

The Russian government confirmed today that CIA Director John Ratcliffe was aboard a mysterious flight that landed in Moscow yesterday. Ratcliffe's purpose, according to the Russian government, was to meet with his counterparts in Russian intelligence agencies. The meeting was not announced publicly and Ratcliffe apparently went to some trouble to conceal the fact that he was taking the trip: the Russian government initially claimed it had no idea why an American military plane had landed near Moscow.

Asked about it today, Trump insisted that it was "semi-routine" for the head of a US intelligence agency to meet with a hostile country. Trump appeared to be toeing the line set out by Russia's intelligence head, Dimitri Peskov, who characterized the meeting as a means of establishing good working relationships between the two agencies.

In reality, of course, Russia is the hostile power behind any number of intelligence operations against the United States. That's true even without addressing the question of how much direct influence the Putin regime has over Trump himself, who benefited from Russian intelligence operations to interfere in the 2016 election.

It's also not at all routine for the head of the CIA to visit Russia, or any openly hostile country. The last time it happened was in 2021, when then-Director Bill Burns went there to warn Russia that the United States was aware of its plans to invade Ukraine. That meeting was not kept a secret from the American public.

Reporting of that fact, and the contrast between Burns's and Ratcliffe's trips, seems to have convinced the Trump administration to change its story. Later today, and well after Russian state media had established the framing of the trip that Trump repeated, the official justification changed abruptly. The Trump administration's new line is that Ratcliffe was there to warn Russia not to attack NATO member states.

Trump has a long history of reaching out in secret to the Putin regime, and once tried to set up a secure private backchannel that the rest of the United States government wouldn't be able to monitor. This is also far from the first time that he's let Russian state media embarrass him by leaking news of those secret contacts to the American public before he has his story straight.

Why does this matter?

• A president who keeps falling for the same basic trick over and over again is either too stupid or too gullible to hold office. 

• It's a problem if the only thing Americans are allowed to know about their president's relationship with Russia is what Vladimir Putin decides to tell them.