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The details are still coming into focus, but the publicly available information is clearly alarming. Four U.S. soldiers, who were conducting tactical training, recently went missing while training in Lithuania. The Associated Press reported, “The U.S. Army said the Hercules armored vehicle the four U.S. soldiers were in during a training exercise had been found submerged in a body of water. It said recovery efforts were underway by U.S. Army and Lithuanian Armed Forces and civilian agencies.”
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte initially said the American troops had perished in the incident, though he soon after clarified that the search is ongoing. As if this weren’t serious enough, there’s also the relevance of the location: The exercise was conducted at a training ground roughly 6 miles from the border with Belarus — and Belarus is closely aligned with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Given all of this, it stands to reason that Donald Trump would be up to speed on the details and the status of the search for the American service members. He is, after all, the president and the commander in chief of the armed forces. And yet, HuffPost noted:
Donald Trump appeared unaware on Wednesday that four U.S. soldiers had gone missing during a NATO training exercise in Lithuania. When asked by a reporter if he had been briefed on the situation that began to unfurl hours before, the president replied, “No, I haven’t.”
He didn’t elaborate. In fact, the president simply moved on to another question.
To be sure, it’s difficult to know whether Trump was telling the truth. Perhaps he’d been briefed but chose to lie about his knowledge of the incident. But taken at face value, four U.S. troops went missing roughly 6 miles from a Russia-aligned country, and the American president was left totally in the dark about the state of the efforts to find them.
Around the same time, the Republican was also asked about the Signal group chat scandal and whether he believed classified information was shared. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I’m not sure, you have to ask the various people involved.”
The comments came after the public saw the details of the online chat, which included a message from Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, telling the White House’s national security team that he wasn’t sure “the president is aware how inconsistent” the proposed strike in Yemen was “with his message on Europe.”
The same text chain featured the White House’s Stephen Miller adding, in apparent reference to the attack plan, “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light.”
The problems should be obvious: Vance was uncertain about Trump’s knowledge of the relevant details, and one of the president’s right-hand loyalists added an “as I heard it” qualifier to the commander in chief’s directive about a deadly military operation abroad.
Taken together, it’s difficult not to wonder just how out of the loop the president is in his own White House.
Five years ago this month, as the severity of the pandemic came into focus, The New York Times published a memorable analysis that included a word to describe Trump that stood out for me as significant: “bystander.”
“While he presents himself as the nation’s commanding figure, Mr. Trump has essentially become a bystander as school superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners across the country take it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president,” the Times explained.
A half-decade later, it appears President Bystander has returned. Trump has taken a keen interest in playing golf, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, banning paper straws, watching an enormous amount of television and helping steer the Kennedy Center — but on life-or-death issues, he’s offering the public a lot of shrugged shoulders and blank stares.
For a president who’s heavily invested in the idea that his immediate predecessor had no idea what was going on around him, Trump’s apparent cluelessness should be a serious problem.