What did Donald Trump do today?

He hallucinated.

Trump, or someone with access to his account, posted Father's Day greetings to his boutique social media site today. It was relatively brief and subdued by Trump's standards: he normally takes the opportunity in his holiday posts to attack his political enemies or just Americans in general. In its (relative) normalcy, it also contrasted sharply with a post he'd made the night before:

 

 

The woman pictured is—pretty obviously—neither of his daughters. 

It's still not confirmed who she is, but there are some clues. The furniture strongly suggests that the setting is Camp David, the Maryland presidential retreat where Trump just happened to be last night. The blanket shows the state seal of Arkansas, and the phone and other details (like the fact that this is a scan of a print, not a native digital photograph) suggest that it was taken in the 1990s, during President Clinton's term. If so, there's a good chance that the woman is Stephanie Streett, a White House aide at the time and now director of Clinton's foundation. 

Stephanie S. Streett in a much more recent photo

Others have theorized that it might be an old picture of one of Trump's billionaire donors, and that the message possibly refers to that woman's daughter, who is chair of a local Republican group in New York City.

Mistaking strangers for close friends or family members is a common symptom of dementia. Because one of the coping strategies that people experiencing cognitive decline use is to make guesses based on context, Trump may have been confused by the picture matching the very setting he was in last night, one he associates with his term in office. Seeing a picture of a woman with very light blonde hair may have been enough to convince him that she was his daughter Ivanka. 

Besides the hair color, neither Ivanka nor Tiffany otherwise closely resemble the woman pictured.

That wasn't the only bizarre and obvious misstatement Trump, who entered his ninth decade this month, made today on social media. He also claimed to have inspected the damage to the reflecting pool on the National Mall today.

Work will begin immediately on fixing the seriously vandalized Reflecting Pool. I just inspected it, and could only say to myself, and those gathered around me, WOW, who would do such a thing? SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE! We will fix it?

The question mark at the end is in the original, and given the slapdash and corrupt approach taken to putting the coating down in the first place, some doubt about whether the pool will get fixed seems appropriate.

Of course, Trump—who is followed everywhere by the White House press pool—did no such thing. He went from Camp David to Andrews AFB via helicopter, and then straight to the White House via motorcade.

The process of "remembering" events that didn't happen, especially if they involve piecing together things a person can remember—like thinking about the reflecting pool, and traveling near it—is called confabulation. It is another symptom of dementia that manifests while a patient is still able to communicate verbally.

Trump told any number of other lies today—that the economy is doing well, that the Strait of Hormuz is open—but those are, at least, lies with an obvious political motive, one that can be explained by a coherent and deliberate plan to deceive. Mistaking a stranger for one of his daughters or imagining that he was a place he wasn't are harder to explain that way.

Why does this matter?

• It's a bad sign when a president's normal uncontrollable urge to lie and exaggerate is what passes for good news about his mental state. 

• Under any other circumstances, Trump would be resting comfortably in a memory care unit.