Trump Surprised Fed Chair Jerome Powell Was Appointed, Trump Appointed Him

Source: Drew Angerer / Getty

President Trump is having a hard time keeping track of the stories he’s told. 

Just hours after telling Republican lawmakers that he planned to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, he then told reporters that he had no intention of letting Powell go. 

“We’re not planning on doing it,” he said Wednesday at the White House. “I don’t rule out anything,” he added, “but I think it’s highly unlikely, unless he has to leave for fraud.”

Trump’s been looking to fire the fed chair for his inability to lower interest rates. 

Trump then noted that he was “surprised” that Powell had even been nominated for the position. 

“I was surprised he was appointed,” Trump said. “I was surprised, frankly, that Biden put him in and extended him.”

There is only one problem: Trump appointed Powell in 2018. He even had a whole rollout and everything. 

What might be concerning is that the president’s comments came just a day after he told an amazing story of his uncle, a physicist “who helped develop radar systems during World War II, taught notorious terrorist Theodore Kaczynski at MIT, despite none of it having actually happened,” the Independent reports.

During a rambling speech he delivered at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Trump claimed that Dr. John Trump, his uncle, was the “longest-serving professor” to ever teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, even though that didn’t happen. John Trump did teach at the university for 37 years, but he was not the longest tenured person there. 

From the Independent: 

President Trump called the late Dr. Trump, a pioneer in cancer research who was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, a “smart man,” citing his multiple scientific degrees, and claimed that one of his students was Kaczynski, a mathematics professor who became widely known as the Unabomber when he was arrested in 1996 for a decades-long string of letter bomb attacks on figures in higher education and other industries. 

“Kaczynski was one of his students. Do you know who Kaczynski was? There’s very little difference between a madman and a genius,” he said.

Trump then claimed to have asked his uncle about the murderous ex-academic. 

“What kind of a student was he Uncle John? He said: “What kind of a student — seriously, good … he’d go around correcting everybody. But it didn’t work out too well for him. Didn’t work out too well, but it’s interesting in life,” Trump said. 

There is only one problem: Kaczynski never attended MIT. He did, however, earn degrees from Harvard and the University of Michigan. 

MSNBC notes that a few weeks ago, President Trump was asked about the Florida detention facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz” and if he knew how long detainees would be kept there, and Trump’s answer didn’t make much sense. 

“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.”

There has been conversation about the president’s mental acumen and whether he’s fit for office. It’s the same kind of questioning that led to former president Joe Biden stepping down from the 2024 election. 

At some point the president is going to have to answer for these missteps as it’s yet to be determined whether these are gaffes or signs of a larger issue, but everything can’t be blamed on Democrats especially when there is video proof showing the opposite.