What did Donald Trump do today?

He sent a surrogate out to say that everything is fine with North Korea, regardless of what the Defense Intelligence Agency thinks.

With trouble on the domestic front, Trump dispatched his national security advisor John Bolton to CBS' Face the Nation this morning to insist that there was a "plan" in place to ensure that North Korea was moving towards denuclearization. (In fact, there are many plans, and there have been for decades--but all of them require North Korea to actually cooperate this time.)

Bolton also said that Trump said that Kim Jong-un was "very emphatic several times" that he intended to surrender his nuclear arsenal. In reality, the Kim regime has said nothing of the sort, and in its public communications it has never even hinted that it intends to give up its current arsenal. In fact, given that much of the summit took place as a one-to-one private meeting, Trump is literally the only person on earth claiming that Kim made any such promise, and therefore the only person vouching for Kim's credibility.

Bolton's appearance came the day after news reports that U.S. military intelligence experts had concluded that North Korea was putting into actions plans to conceal and expand its nuclear arsenal, while deceiving future U.S. inspections for as long as possible. 

Trump's official position remains that, because he met with Kim for a few hours, "there is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea."

Who cares?

• There is more involved in solving problems than just declaring them solved.

• There is something terribly wrong with a situation in which the President of the United States is defending a rogue nuclear nation from the findings of his own military intelligence experts.