Aging President Increasingly Can’t Remember Which Things Did or Did Not Happen

On Tuesday, President Trump interrupted an energy and innovation event in Pennsylvania to “brag” about his uncle, John Trump. He proceeded to cough up a story about his tenure as a professor at MIT, and one student in particular: Ted Kaczynski. “I said, ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John?’” Trump recounted. “He said, ‘What kind of a student? Then he said, ‘seriously good.’ He said he’d correct, he’d go around correcting everybody, but it didn’t work out too well for him.”

Okay! This was surely an interesting conversation that definitely occurred, for sure, given that John Trump died in 1985, years before Ted Kaczynski was outed as the Unabomber. Why ask about one student in a decades-long tenure at MIT who at that point had no claim to fame at all? Also Ted Kaczynski didn’t go to MIT. So there’s that.

Merely a day later, when the inevitable press frenzy that rightly surrounds the sitting leader of the free world either lying so readily and smoothly as only an obvious sociopath could manage or being in such clear mental decline as to precipitate a national crisis had reached a crescendo — [touches earpiece] ah, well, nevertheless — more concerning missteps:

“He’s a terrible Fed chair,” Trump said to the press on Wednesday, about Jerome Powell. “I was surprised he was appointed. I was surprised frankly that Biden put him in and extended him.” Powell, of course, was appointed chairman in 2018; can someone — Jake Tapper, perhaps? — remind the Big Guy who was president back then?