Referring to Republicans in 2017, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked, “It appears they don’t know I’m not president.” The relevance of that quote continues to linger.

When Donald Trump launched his 2020 re-election campaign, for example, the Republican incumbent devoted much of his speech to Clinton, despite the fact that she wasn’t running. With just weeks remaining before Election Day 2020, Trump not only pushed then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to uncover and release Clinton emails, he also lobbied then-Attorney General Bill Barr to prosecute Clinton for reasons unknown. (This was before the GOP started pretending to care about the “weaponization” of federal law enforcement.)

Nearly four years later, the former president is still fixated on the rival he defeated in 2016, and who hasn’t held public office for more than a decade. Here’s what the presumptive GOP nominee told Newsmax during an on-air interview this week from Mar-a-Lago:

“By the way, they released Hillary Clinton. She hammered her phones. She used all sorts of acid testing and everything else they call it, BleachBit, but it’s essentially acid that will destroy everything, you know, within 10 miles. I mean, what she did was unbelievable. Nothing happens to her. Nothing happens to Bill Clinton. He took it out in his socks, you know?”

In context, the former president was feeling sorry for himself: He’s dealing with criminal prosecutions, including his classified documents case, while those rascally ol’ Clintons got away with related misdeeds.

At the heart of the problem, of course, is that Trump continues to have no idea what he’s talking about. Despite having obsessed over this for nine years, he continues to believe software with the word “bleach” in the title was actually some kind of acid. It wasn’t.

Relatedly, Clinton was never “released.” She was investigated, and officials couldn’t find evidence to warrant an indictment.

As for the idea that Bill Clinton “took it out in his socks,” Trump badly flubbed the details of a story about audio recordings that were kept in a sock drawer.

None of this is new information. The Republican has struggled with the basics of this line of attack for many years, even after having been presented with simple truths, over and over again.

All of which leads us to a related concern, which a Washington Post analysis raised after noting the oddity of Trump’s bizarre “acid” rhetoric.

Not only has debunking this claim not had an apparent effect, he is now so used to making this nonsensical assertion that he feels like the baseline misinformation isn’t enough for his audience. This is common behavior from Trump, certainly, in the abstract and the specific example. But it is more fraught now than it used to be, given the extent to which Trump and his allies have focused on mental sharpness as a necessary qualification for the presidency.

It’s very much in line with the recent focus on Trump’s routine mental lapses and cognitive missteps: They’re relevant in the 2024 campaign to the extent that Republicans keep wanting to focus on routine mental lapses and cognitive missteps.

For all of the GOP preoccupation with President Joe Biden’s age and acuity, he’s not the one repeating nonsensical allegations about former foes after the claims have been debunked ad nauseum.