Is Donald Trump out of the loop?

There’s a lot about his own administration the president doesn’t seem to know.

Almost without a doubt, the biggest story of the last week was the report that Trump administration officials discussed a sensitive military operation using the unclassified app Signal — and accidentally invited the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic onto the group chat.

The revelation spawned furious reaction, lawsuits, and calls for resignations; the White House spent all week scrambling to explain itself.

At each stage of the story, President Donald Trump seemed just behind the curve, consistently unaware of the latest developments.

This started last Monday, when The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg first revealed the existence of the group chat. Trump was asked about the story that day.

“I don’t know anything about it,” the president responded. Perhaps he was just feigning ignorance, but his reaction did seem genuine: “You’re saying that they had what?” he asked the reporter.

“They were using Signal to coordinate on sensitive materials,” the reporter explained.

“Having to do with what, what were they talking about?” Trump asked.

“The Houthis,” he was told.

“The Houthis, you mean the attack on the Houthis? Well, it couldn’t have been very effective, because the attack was very effective, I can tell you that. I don’t know anything about it. You’re telling me about it for the first time.”

In fairness, this was when the story was still relatively new — about three hours after The Atlantic published its first report — although you would think the president’s staff would fill him in during that time.

But, days later, Trump still seemed unaware of the most pertinent details of the Signal chat. Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Trump was asked to offer an assurance that no classified information was shared in the text thread. “Well, that’s what I’ve heard. I don’t know, I’m not sure,” he responded. “You’ll have to ask the various people involved. I really don’t know.”

Minutes later, Trump was asked whether he was reconsidering Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s position in light of the Signal revelations. “Hegseth is doing a great job, he had nothing to do with this,” Trump relied. “Hegseth? How do you bring Hegseth into this, he had nothing to do with this.”

Hegseth, of course, has a lot to do with the Signal story; he was the one who shared the war plans attack plans in the chat. It would have been very difficult to consume any news about the Signal chat without being aware of that.

This pattern has played out repeatedly in recent days. Last week, Trump was asked I he had been briefed about four U.S. soldiers who went missing in Lithuania. “No, I haven’t,” he replied. “I haven’t.” Once again, he seemed genuinely unaware of the situation; certainly, he did not take the opportunity to at least offer a stock message of concern.

Perhaps most notably, earlier this month, Trump was asked about a federal judge’s contention that the president secretly his proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act. (The proclamation was signed on a Friday night, but wasn’t publicly announced until Saturday morning, by which time it appears migrants were already being detained in order to deport them under the order.)

“He wants to know why the proclamation was signed in the dark — his words — and why people were rushed onto planes,” Fox News reporter Pete Doocy asked the president.

“Because we want to get criminals out of our country, number one, and I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” Trump responded. “Other people handled it, but Marco Rubio has done a great job and he wanted them out and we go along with that. We want to get criminals out of our country.”

Trump, in fact, did sign the proclamation, at least according to the signature that appears on the Federal Register:

The White House communications director later explained: “President Trump was obviously referring to the original Alien Enemies Act that was signed back in 1798. The recent Executive Order was personally signed by President Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act that designated Tren de Aragua as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in order to apprehend and deport these heinous criminals.”

But that explanation does not stand up to scrutiny. Doocy’s question was pretty clearly about the 2025 proclamation, not the 1798 law. And Trump’s reference to “other people,” including Marco Rubio, doesn’t seem to indicate that he had John Adams on the mind. Trump seemed fully aware that the question was about the new proclamation; he did not, however, seem aware that he had signed it (or, perhaps, willing to admit that he had).

By the next day, Trump’s comment had made its way into a legal filing by the ACLU, which is challenging the proclamation in court.

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One of the interesting through-lines running across several of these answers is an attempt by Trump distance himself from the more controversial aspects of his administration.

The Signal chat? “You’ll have to ask the various people involved.” Alien Enemies Act? “Other people handled that.”

Over the years, Trump has often promoted the image of himself as a micromanager — which is why it’s surprising to hear him admitting ignorance about key details (whether or not the ignorance is genuine). Faced with a dropping approval rating, he now seems to be willing to part with that micromanager reputation if it means blaming scandals on his underlings.

But that’s a dangerous approach for any president, as Harry Truman could remind him:

Some of the responses, though — especially his first answer about the Signal chat and his admission that he hadn’t been briefed about four missing American soldiers — seem to suggest the possibility that Trump is genuinely not being fully kept up-to-date on key developments a president should be aware of.

The Signal chat itself, especially with Vice President Vance’s comment to other Trump top advisers about the president not being “aware” of the implications of the Houthi strike, also raises the question of how intimately involved Trump is with key decisionmaking.

A key test to answer to that question will come this Wednesday, the day Trump has dubbed “Liberation Day” because the next stage of his tariff agenda will go into effect.

Reporting on what exactly “Liberation Day” will look like has been all over the map, partially because it appears Trump is at odds with his own advisers about how sweeping the tariffs should be. Last week, the markets celebrated the news that the April 2 tariffs would be narrower than expected, with reciprocal tariffs only focusing on the 15% of nations with the largest trade imbalances with the U.S.

But Trump is reportedly pushing his aides to go bigger. According to the Washington Post, he has even revived his campaign-trail idea to impose universal tariffs that would apply to imports no matter their country of origin. Asked on Sunday if only some countries would face reciprocal tariffs this week, Trump asked, “Who told you 10 or 15 countries?”

Does that mean all countries will be impacted? “You’d start with all countries, so let’s see what happens,” the president said. “There are many countries. I haven’t heard a rumor about 15 countries, 10 or 15 countries.”

We know that tariffs are one of the policy issues that Trump cares about most. In his first term, however, his advisers were frequently successful in urging him to tamp down his trade agenda; economic aide Gary Cohn even allegedly stole a letter off Trump’s desk that would have ended a free trade deal with South Korea.

How expansive Trump’s Wednesday tariffs end up being — universal, as he seems to want them, or targeted, as his advisers are pushing for — could offer insight into how much of the Trump administration is being run by Trump himself.

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More news to know

• NBC: Trump won’t rule out seeking a third term in the White House, tells NBC News ‘there are methods’ for doing so

• Reuters: ‘Pissed off’ at Putin, Trump threatens tariffs on Russian oil if Moscow blocks Ukraine deal

• USA Today: Dr. Peter Marks, top vaccine official at FDA, resigns and criticizes RFK Jr.

• NYT: White House Takes Highly Unusual Step of Directly Firing Line Prosecutors

• CNN: Far-right leader Marine Le Pen banned from 2027 presidential race, throwing French politics into disarray

• WSJ: Hegseth Brought His Wife to Sensitive Meetings With Foreign Military Officials

• Politico: DOGE’s Marko Elez is back on U.S. payroll

• NPR: White House Correspondents’ dinner cancels comedian Amber Ruffin’s appearance

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The day ahead

• President Trump will sign executive orders at 1 p.m. ET and again at 5:30 p.m. ET.

• The Senate will hold a procedural vote to advance Matthew Whitaker’s nomination to be U.S. ambassador to NATO.

• The House will vote on up to seven pieces of legislation.

• The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Catholic Charities Bureau, Inc. v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission, a Catholic group’s bid for tax-exempt status, and Rivers v. Guerrero, a case on post-conviction litigation.