(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.
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.
Trump actually did sort of declare victory on North Korea immediately upon touching down on US soil after the summit in June with Kim.
"Just landed - a long trip, but everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office," Trump said on Twitter. "There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea."
Trump was basking in success of his trip at the time and clearly wanted it to seem as historic as possible.
But his declaration was premature. The agreement he signed in North Korea was more of an entree into figuring out the details. And his administration, since his tweet, has reaffirmed that there is still a nuclear threat from North Korea. Obviously. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo shuttles back and forth to hammer out the hard details. Meanwhile, North Korea's nuclear program continues.
Trump has not been chastened, however. Most recently, he's sought credit for not being in the middle of a nuclear war.
"Many good conversations with North Korea-it is going well! In the meantime, no Rocket Launches or Nuclear Testing in 8 months. All of Asia is thrilled. Only the Opposition Party, which includes the Fake News, is complaining. If not for me, we would now be at War with North Korea!"
OK! (Set aside that Trump was the one tempting nuclear war with his previous taunting of Kim. He's asking for credit for avoiding a war he was inching toward.)
On the subject of the immigrant children, the administration was slow to realize its moral mistake in separating the children from parents at the border. The resulting chaos is just becoming clear.
"We're going to have strong, very strong borders, but we're going to keep the families together," he said. "I didn't like the sight or the feeling of families being separated."
"So we're keeping families together and this will solve that problem," Trump said. And then, just before he signed the executive order, he added, "You're going to have a lot of happy people."
He hasn't said much at all about the issue since then.
But problems became apparent immediately. The executive order sought to detain undocumented families together and it ran afoul of a law that mandated children not be detained indefinitely. And while the stated purpose was to reunite families, it's not clear that's happened much at all. In fact, the government this week made clear it had separated even more children than previously thought.
These are only the most recent examples.
"There's no such thing as Obamacare anymore," he said after Republicans passed their tax reform bill, even though Republicans' tax bill only zeroed out the penalty for not obtaining health insurance coverage.
CNN's Greg Krieg looked at a long list of things Trump has tried to take credit for earlier this year.
But these new examples are something else. They're Trump taking credit for the efforts of his own administration before his own policies can be enacted, which is why they feel so premature. He's trying to take credit for things where no credit is yet deserved.