‘When did it come out?’ Trump remains disengaged as events unfold around him

For proponents of voting rights and racially diverse democracy, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais was a brutal gut-punch. UCLA law professor Rick Hasen wrote in a Slate analysis that the decision, written by Republican-appointed justices, “will go down in history as one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century.”

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Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent that the ruling renders Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “all but a dead letter” and that the consequences “are likely to be far-reaching and grave.” She added that in states “where that law continues to matter — the States still marked by residential segregation and racially polarized voting — minority voters can now be cracked out of the electoral process.”

With this in mind, it’s easy to imagine Donald Trump reacting to the ruling with delight, not just because of his record of radical animus, but also because Republican-appointed justices just delivered a ruling that will almost certainly benefit the president’s party.

And yet, when a reporter asked Trump about the high court’s decision, several hours after its release, he appeared to have absolutely no idea what had happened.

“Tell me, when did the ruling come out?” the president asked, adding that he’d “been with contractors” talking about his ballroom vanity project. After talking about the ballroom initiative for a bit — once he gets started on the subject, it’s generally tough for him to stop — he eventually told the press corps, “Tell me about what happened.”

No one asked the obvious follow-up question: Shouldn’t he have known what happened?

A similar exchange unfolded a week earlier, when a reporter asked whether the president could confirm recent reporting about his administration taking steps to send 1,100 Afghans to the Democratic Republic of Congo. “I don’t know,” he replied.

The week before that, amid reports that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had met with administration officials for an important closed-door discussion, a reporter asked Trump whether Anthropic did, in fact, have a meeting at the White House.

“Who?” he replied, apparently confused. When the reporter repeated the question, he again said, “I have no idea.”

The frequency with which this comes up is an underappreciated element of the Republican’s presidency.

At a White House Cabinet meeting in November, for example, whenever Trump was asked a question of any substance, he’d ask someone else to answer. The same week, the president was pressed to defend his scandalous pardon for Changpeng Zhao, founder of the crypto exchange Binance, who helped finance the president’s stablecoin and put money in the Trump family’s pockets.

“I don’t know who he is,” he replied.

This wasn’t the first time. In March, after Trump pardoned one of his donors, he was pressed for an explanation. He again appeared clueless: “They” told him that the criminal had been treated unfairly, which was enough for him to sign a pardon.

The frequency with which this comes up is unsettling. Days earlier, Trump appeared lost when asked about developments in Israel. Two weeks before that, when asked about a possible suspension of habeas corpus, the president initially thought that was a reference to a person, before telling a reporter, “Oh, I don’t know.”

Around the same time, Trump was forced to reverse course after he discovered that he had cut off counterterrorism funds to New York City days earlier.

Last September, as part of a half-hearted, last-minute attempt to prevent a government shutdown, Trump welcomed congressional leaders to the White House for a meeting. After it failed to produce results, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters that the president was apparently “not aware” of the key elements of the Democratic position.

A month earlier, Trump said he didn’t “know anything about” a failed top-secret mission in North Korea in 2019 that he reportedly authorized. At a White House event in July, a reporter noted the Trump administration had paused a shipment of military aid intended for Ukraine a week earlier. Asked who approved this, the president replied, “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”

In May, during a Q&A with a White House press pool, Trump was asked about his administration’s new student visa policy, and he responded in a way that suggested he had no idea what the reporter was talking about.