For the past few days, our president — back at work after a busy August spent golfing and rage tweeting — has been making stuff up about Hurricane Dorian, the deadly storm currently battering the Southeast.

Late-night comedians have been roasting Donald Trump for his lies, including Seth Meyers, who aired a segment this week about Trump’s meteorological ignorance.

The segment is supposed to be funny, obviously. But as I watched Trump repeat the exact same phrase about various “Category 5” storms — sounding each time as if he was uttering this phrase for the first time — I felt a familiar sense of dread.

I remembered the same experience in dealing with my late mother, who struggled with cognitive decline for years before her death.

To be clear: nobody knows for sure if our sitting president is experiencing cognitive decline, which is why so many psychiatrists and mental health experts have called for him to be tested.

What I do know is that if you examine the Trump presidency through the lens of cognitive decline, some of its more bewildering aspects start to make a lot more sense.

Observers — particularly those troubled by the cruelty of his regime — tend to view Trump as lazy, incompetent, demagogic and mendacious. But it seems increasingly possible that the president’s behavior is also a function of his desperate attempts to mask serious cognitive struggles.

Anyone who has dealt with a friend or relative in cognitive decline can tell you that the person in question almost never admits to their struggles. Instead, they go to elaborate lengths to hide their impairment.