According to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the issue, the misperception began after U.S. Pacific Command (Pacom) made its April 9 announcement, which stated that the ship would cancel scheduled stops in Australia and head toward the “Western Pacific” from Singapore. Although the statement did not mention North Korea explicitly, when asked about it, Pacom officials made a direct link between the carrier’s re-routing and the North Korean threat. The decision to send the carrier north was a “prudent” measure as North Korea posed “the number one threat in the region,” one official said.

As media outlets reported widely on the deployment, senior officials made comments in the following days that reinforced the belief that the ship was already headed in the direction of North Korea. On April 11, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, asked about the Vinson during a news conference, said the ship was “on her way up there.” The next day, Trump made his comments in a television interview.

While Pacom made reference to the Carl Vinson’s participation in an Indian Ocean exercise around that same time in at least one media report, its statements about the ship’s location remained unclear, and most outlets continued to report the ship’s movement toward Korea. That gave rise to the belief, as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un oversaw a massive military parade and a failed missile launch over the weekend, that the ship was getting ever closer to the isolated Asian nation.