What was that again . . . ?

The outbreak of hearing loss at the White House is downright astonishing.

First to be stricken were two Republican senators called to a meeting in the Cabinet Room last week. Neither could recall or insisted they didn’t hear the president refer to some African nations as “s---holes.”

“We do not recall the president saying these comments specifically,” U.S. Sens. David Perdue (Ga.) and Tom Cotton (Ark.) said in a joint statement.

Over the weekend we discover that they fell back on a fig leaf they had deftly donned around the possibility that the expletive in question was “s---house” not “s---hole.”

Would one rather than the other make those outside Washington feel any better or worse about the descent into racial stereotyping by the Leader of the Free World? Likely not, but it sure got Perdue and Cotton off the hook for a time.

Yesterday another attendee at that meeting, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, had a similar sudden bout of White House hearing loss. She testified under oath that she “did not hear” President Trump use the vulgarity to describe African countries. But she said she doesn’t “dispute the president was using tough language.”

U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., asked her specifically if she heard the vulgarity as first reported or a “substantially similar word” to describe certain countries. She said “others in the room were also using tough language.”

As if that explained everything — or somehow made it all right.

U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (DN.J.) told Nielsen, “Your silence and your amnesia is complicity.”

It’s sad enough when politicians lie. But the American public has grown rather accustomed to that. When a key member of the nation’s security team has memory lapses, then she does indeed become an enabler of the president’s outrages.