(CNN) Never shy about taking credit, President Donald Trump twice recently claimed to have solved a problem that turned out to still be a problem.

He wanted the problem of North Korea's nuclear weapons to be solved after his historic meeting with Kim Jong Un last month, and he wanted the problem of children separated by the US government from their parents to be solved with the swipe of his pen on an executive order.

But weeks later, the North Korean nuclear threat still very much exists, and the problem of children separated from their parents has worsened as the US government clearly does not know exactly how many children it has or how to get them back to their parents.

These are unrelated stories, obviously, but they share what's become a truism of White House -- which is that Trump likes to take credit for things he hasn't quite accomplished. The details will come later.

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It's not unlike the famous old quote attributed to Vermont Sen. George Aitken , a Republican, who put forward a plan for the US in Vietnam in 1966. The United States should declare victory and get out, he's been quoted as saying. Whether Aitken said it that way or not and what exactly he meant has been debated.

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