Donald Trump has made no effort to hide his growing contempt for Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, but as NBC News reported, the president made a new comment about his target that raised eyebrows:

Trump said he was ‘surprised’ that Powell had been nominated to be chair of the Federal Reserve. ‘I was surprised he was appointed,’ Trump said. ‘I was surprised, frankly, that Biden put him in and extended him.’

The Republican did not appear to be kidding.

I can appreciate the fact that memories can be short in American politics, and Trump often has no use for the integrity of recent history, but there’s no reason for Trump to be “surprised” that Powell was appointed as the Fed chair — because Trump is the one who chose him for the position in 2017. (Joe Biden renominated Powell in 2021, and he received broad, bipartisan support in the Senate.)

This incident came one day after the Republican president told a detailed story about a conversation he had with his uncle about having taught Ted Kaczynski — better known as “Unabomber” — while John Trump was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

That conversation couldn’t have happened — in part because John Trump died more than a decade before Kaczynski was caught and identified, and in part because Kaczynski was never a student at MIT.

And while this was certainly not the first time the president had shared the details of a conversation that never actually occurred, hours earlier, he also suggested that IQ tests are comparable to cognitive exams that are used to identify evidence of dementia, mental deterioration and neurodegenerative diseases.

Similarly, two weeks ago, Trump participated in a press conference at a detention facility in the Florida Everglades — known as “Alligator Alcatraz” — and a reporter asked the president whether there was an “expected time frame” that detainees would be kept at the controversial camp.

“I’m gonna spend a lot of — this is my home state,” the Republican replied. “I love it. … I feel very comfortable in the state — I’ll spend a lot of time here.”

He appeared unfazed by the disconnect between the question and the answer.

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Incidents like these are not uncommon. Indeed, Democrats tried to make them a campaign issue ahead of Election Day 2024. In the race’s closing weeks, for example, Trump told a 12-minute story about Arnold Palmer’s genitalia, which came just days after the Republican decided to stop taking questions at a town-hall event and instead sway to music — for 39 minutes.

“Let me explain because I’ve done a lot of town hall meetings,” Barack Obama said soon after. “The point of a town hall meeting is to take questions. He just decided, you know what, I’m gonna stop taking questions and then he’s swaying to ‘Ave Maria’ and ‘Y.M.C.A.’ for about half an hour. Folks are standing there, not sure what’s happening. Can you imagine if I did that?”

The former Democratic president concluded, “You would be worried if your grandpa started acting like this. … The point is we do not need to see what an older, loonier Donald Trump looks like with no guardrails.”

That was nine months ago. Now we’re seeing exactly what that looks like.

I’m mindful of the fact that many observers — including those who’ve taken questions about Joe Biden’s mental acuity quite seriously — treat this line of inquiry as unfair. Trump’s mental health is fine, they argue, and his oddities can be chalked up to his weird personality and brazen dishonesty.

Perhaps. But if Trump’s cognitive state were deteriorating, what kind of signs would we look for? Maybe we’d look for instances in which he forgot about appointing powerful officials whom he appointed? Or shared the details of non-existent conversations? Or offered answers unrelated to the questions he’d been asked?