Last Sunday, on President Donald Trump’s third consecutive weekend visit to his private country club in Florida, the White House told reporters traveling with him that, among other activities, he’d played “a couple of holes” of golf. By Monday, professional golfer Rory McIlroy spilled the beans that he and the president had played a full round—all 18 holes—at the president’s invitation.

Asked to square the initial false claim with McIlroy’s account, Trump spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told pool reporters in a statement, “As stated yesterday the President played golf. He intended to play a few holes and decided to play longer. He also had a full day of meetings, calls and interviews for the new NSA, which he is continuing today before returning to Washington, D.C. [t]onight.”

Whether the president played two or four or 18 holes isn’t the most important detail in the world, but Trump and his aides have been so unreliable with details, that an error like this raises bigger questions like, Why was the press pool misled? Was it intentional? How often are such details wrong?

Following the president around in case news breaks is a frequently thankless but important job, and when the president does something casual and uneventful like playing golf, the pool is often only able to report whom he played with, how many holes, and so on. Was the error a result of sloppy miscommunication between the press team and the president? Was the White House growing sensitive to criticism of Trump’s busy, expensive, and profitable recreation schedule, and trying to downplay it? Was it an outright lie?

The truth is, we don’t know and probably never will. In most contexts, this would be a fairly insignificant snafu, but in this case it underscores a larger epistemic folly. No administration is completely honest, but Trump’s is the first to be built on the premise that lying to the media (while engaged in a public battle to discredit it) is a sound way to advance the president’s agenda. Under the circumstances, reporters can’t make what once seemed like safe assumptions and inferences about the White House’s claims. We need fresh tactics.