Three tweets from the past three days display this startling lack of knowledge. (No, none of them include “covfefe.”) On Tuesday morning, Trump called on Republicans to get rid of the filibuster to pass two key pieces of the party’s agenda: “The U.S. Senate should switch to 51 votes, immediately, and get Healthcare and TAX CUTS approved, fast and easy.” But Senate Republicans are using reconciliation rules to take up the House’s health-care bill, which means they need only 51 votes anyway. GOP leaders plan to use the same process for tax cuts as well. Either Trump has not been told this, or his staff has briefed him on this and he has simply forgotten.

Rewinding the clock to Sunday brings us a similarly baffling statement, again on health care. “I suggest that we add more dollars to Healthcare and make it the best anywhere,” he tweeted Sunday night, “ObamaCare is dead — the Republicans will do much better!” Set aside for the moment that Obamacare is not dead, though Trump is doing his best to kill it through sabotage. Focus for now on the suggestion “we add more dollars to Healthcare.” The American Health Care Act — which Trump celebrated the House’s passage of with a big Rose Garden photo op — cuts Medicaid by more than $800 billion. Trump’s own budget adds another $600 billion in cuts on top of that. Again: Has his staff not briefed him what the AHCA does or what his budget calls for? Or has he been told and forgotten?

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The last example came the same day as Trump’s call to get rid of the filibuster. Trump wrote, “We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military. Very bad for U.S. This will change.” There are kernels of truth here: Germany has a trade surplus with the U.S. — and critics say Germany’s trade policies hurt other countries. What’s worrying is “this will change,” which implies that Trump wants a new U.S.-Germany trade deal. But Germany, as a member of the European Union, can’t negotiate a trade deal with the United States by itself. As Trump’s Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the very same day, “The E.U. is one of our largest trading partners, and any negotiations legally must be conducted at the E.U. level and not with individual nations.” (Yes, Trump technically could be saying “this will change” under a U.S.-E.U. deal. But lumping trade in with military spending — which is not dictated by E.U.-wide agreements — suggests that he is simply mistaken.)

This mistake is even more concerning because Trump has made it before — to Angela Merkel’s face, no less. When the German chancellor visited Washington in March, a senior German official told the Times of London that “Ten times Trump asked [Merkel] if he could negotiate a trade deal with Germany. Every time she replied, ‘You can’t do a trade deal with Germany, only the E.U..’ On the eleventh refusal, Trump finally got the message, ‘Oh, we’ll do a deal with Europe then.’ ” In other words, the head of another government corrected the president on a basic fact (after multiple efforts!) and within a few weeks, he is making the exact same mistake.

I’ve suggested two possible explanations for each of these errors: Either the president did not know an obvious detail, or he was told it and forgot. But there’s a third possibility: He was told, but he wasn’t listening. After all, Trump’s troubles with focus are well-known. The president’s attention span is so short that briefers have to insert his name more to keep his attention. It’s so short that NATO staffers reportedly asked other heads of state to keep their speeches short. Take it from Trump himself: “My attention span is short,” he wrote in 1990.

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