With the (justified) flap over Donald Trump’s invitation to Vladimir Putin to intervene in U.S. politics, and with his continued stonewalling on tax returns, another aspect of Trump’s performance at the press conference just now has been under-appreciated. It involves a point of apparent ignorance that deserves note for the long-term record.

After nearly a week awash in news about Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential running mate Tim Kaine — current Senator from Virginia, former governor of that state, Democrat — Trump apparently confuses him with Tom Kean, former governor of New Jersey and a Republican. (Both names are both pronounced “kane.”) When someone corrects him on the state name, Trump switches that but goes on talking about events drawn from New Jersey politics (with which he’d naturally be more familiar) rather than Virginia’s.

Here’s the relevant passage:

The oddity is an apparent double confusion: first Kaine with Kean; and then Kean with his successor Jim Florio, a Democrat who actually proposed tax increases more like what Trump is talking about. Overall everything Trump said made better sense if applied to New Jersey than to Virginia, including about the governor’s falling popularity, since Kaine remained popular.

More from NJ Patch here, Politico here, and RedState here. (Update I’ve received mail from some readers saying that Trump has referred to Kaine and his record in Virginia, not New Jersey, in the past week. So conceivably this could have been a smaller-scale glitch.)

Recall how much trouble Rick Perry got in simply for forgetting, in the pressure of a debate, the name of one of the three federal departments he wanted to close.

***

In this same press conference, Trump referred more than once to the man who shot Ronald Reagan as “David” Hinckley, rather than John. Everyone makes transient mistakes of this sort — I do them all the time, everyone does. But I can think of no precedent, whatsoever, for a national nominee who clearly does not know who the vice-presidential nominee on the other side is. [Sorry, not “George” Hinckley as I thought I originally heard.]

This was the same press conference in which Trump said that Barack Obama was “the most ignorant president in history” and added that Vladimir Putin had called him (Trump) “a genius.”

Something is wrong with this man.