Gov. Wes Moore has apparently been on Donald Trump’s mind quite a bit lately. At an Oval Office event last week, for example, the president told reporters unprompted that he doesn’t believe the Maryland Democrat is “presidential timber.”
A few days later, the Republican responded to criticisms from Moore by threatening to reassess federal aid to a Maryland infrastructure project, before questioning the governor’s military service. (Moore is a decorated combat veteran who served in Afghanistan.)
As this week got underway, Trump once again brought up Moore at another White House event to share an odd story.
“I met him at the Army-Navy game,” Trump claimed. “They said, ‘Oh, there’s Gov. Moore, he’d love to see you.’ He came over to me, he hugged me, he shook my hand. ... He said, ‘Sir, you’re the greatest president in my lifetime.’ I said, ‘It’s really nice that you say that. I’d love you to say it publicly, but I don’t think you can do that.’”
According to the president’s version of events, Moore also told him he’s doing a “fantastic job,” despite his public criticisms.
At face value, the story is literally unbelievable. Why in the world would a progressive Democratic governor and fierce Trump critic tell a Republican president with an authoritarian agenda how great he is?
Moore, not surprisingly, mocked the strange tale. “I’m a person who takes my integrity very seriously, and I spent the past six months before that election campaigning as to why I did not think that he should be the next president of the United States,” the governor told WBAL Radio. “So when I say that conversation never happened, that imaginary conversation never happened, I mean that conversation never happened.”
The Washington Post reported soon after:
Video taken at the game by a crew for a Trump documentary series on Fox Nation — that Fox News clipped and aired Monday — shows Moore welcoming Trump with a handshake and talking to him briefly about rebuilding the collapsed Key Bridge in Baltimore. In the footage, Moore tells Trump that, with federal funding, Maryland could reopen the bridge during the Trump administration. ... Moore’s spokesman told The Post the exchange captured on video was the only time Moore and Trump met that day.
In other words, Trump made up the Moore conversation, and he presented fiction as fact to the public. In fact, the Republican has repeatedly shared the details of conversations that only occurred in his overactive imagination.
And in case that weren’t enough to raise concerns about the president’s cognitive abilities, at the same Oval Office event in which he talked about the chat with Moore that didn’t actually happen, Trump also said, “They call me the president of Europe, which is an honor.” (No one calls him “the president of Europe.”)
He proceeded to falsely claimed to have “stopped seven wars,” before adding, “Really, the number is actually 10,” based on conflicts that he believes he prevented from happening.
This comes a month after Trump expressed surprise that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was appointed, despite the fact that he was the one who appointed Powell in the first place.
Two weeks earlier, 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.
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.
Now he’s boasting about imaginary conversations and pointing to unnamed sources who’ve labeled him “the president of Europe.”
As USA Today’s Rex Huppke summarized, after Trump twice suggested he was headed to Russia when he was actually going to Alaska, “That’s the sort of thing you hear before having to make a difficult decision about grandpa’s future.” Huppke similarly recently described the president as being “in obvious mental decline.”
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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