"I was surprised he was appointed"

[LetMyPeopleVote]

12. Maddow Blog-Trump says he was surprised that Jerome Powell, the Fed chair he appointed, was appointed

The president seemed to forget that he appointed Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, which was part of an unsettling pattern of cognitive missteps.

“You would be worried if your grandpa started acting like this,” Barack Obama warned voters last fall. “The point is we do not need to see what an older, loonier Donald Trump looks like with no guardrails.”

This came to mind watching Trump’s latest cognitive missteps. www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...

— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2025-07-16T18:49:54.892Z

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-says-was-surprised-jerome-powell-fed-chair-appointed-was-appoint-rcna219162

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.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:aunpu65mdrhwfie7ynymlzeh/post/3lu3tm6j3by2u

Link to tweet

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......

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?