What did Donald Trump do today?

He spoke with Benjamin Netanyahu, according to Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the past day, which we know because Netanyahu himself told reporters about it today. According to Netanyahu, the two discussed efforts to secure the release of hostages taken during the October 7th attack. Netanyahu characterized the call as "very friendly, very warm and very important."

Not much else is known because so far, Trump's team has not even acknowledged that it happened.

Trump has done this before—making calls he either thinks are secret, or can't be bothered to inform the American public about, leaving foreign leaders like free to spin them however they like. This has most often been a problem with Vladimir Putin. 

It's also not known whether the actual United States government was informed. Trump has actively shut out the State Department on calls with enormous diplomatic implications during his transition, which he takes on unsecured phones. If not, that would mean that only Israel (and any foreign intelligence agencies that intercepted the call) would have a reliable record of the call.

Trump also has a habit of letting foreign leaders corner him without advisors, or even without his own translator. During his first term, he routinely shut out even his own hand-picked national security team to keep them from knowing what he was telling foreign leaders like Putin. This became a major point in his first impeachment, which hinged on a transcript of the call in which Trump tried to force Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to instigate a fake "investigation" of Joe Biden's son Hunter. Trump at first went to extraordinary lengths to hide that transcript, while lying about the actual substance of the call.

Why does this matter?

• The American people have a right to know what their president is doing, even if he doesn't feel like telling them.