WASHINGTON – As Donald Trump tweets go, this one on Saturday sounded especially uninteresting.

“Fantastic crowd and great people yesterday in Key West, Florida,” Trump wrote. “Thank you!”

But Trump was not in Key West “yesterday” at all. He came and went two days prior.

On Wednesday, the day before he actually visited Key West, Trump spoke at a news conference about a deadly clash in Syria between U.S. forces and Russian mercenaries. He said it occurred “recently, a month ago.”

It occurred more than two months prior.

Little errors, no doubt. But Trump has made these kinds of errors so frequently that you can almost set your watch to them.

The president of the United States, who has boasted that he has “one of the great memories of all time,” has a problem with time itself.

Trump has inaccurately stated a date or time period on at least 51 occasions since he took office. It is not exactly clear why.

It is entirely possible that at least some of the date errors are honest mistakes. Trump has shown genuine confusion about a wide variety of subjects, and he has shown little interest in checking information before he speaks.

It seems likely, though, that at least some of the errors are deliberate, a particularly bizarre element of Trump’s comprehensive assault on facts. One theory: Trump, a master salesman, believes his stories sound more compelling if he says they happened more recently.

Almost every time he has given an inaccurate date, Trump has moved the date forward — to make an event seem as if it occurred closer to the present.

“As far as he’s concerned, that’s the only issue ever: the transactional aspect of it. Round up, round down, round sideways. Eliminate, add, flat-out lie. Doesn’t matter. Shape it so it’s the shape it needs to be to get to be what the target market wants to hear — what voters want to hear. Massage it, pummel it. Why would time be any different than any other fact?” said Gwenda Blair, the author of two books on Trump.

Trump is known for his regular promises to release plans “two weeks” in the future, then failing to do so. But he also has issues counting “weeks” in the past.

When Trump mused in a March 29 speech about the spectacular SpaceX rocket launch, he said, “When I looked at the rocket that went up three weeks ago, where the tanks came back…” The launch occurred seven weeks prior, not three weeks.

When Trump claimed at a Republican fundraiser on March 14 that he deserved credit for North Korea taking part in the Olympics, he said, “Everybody’s saying, ‘Oh, he’s going to get us in trouble, in trouble.’ Then three weeks ago, you hear, ‘We’d love to go to the Olympics and participate.’” North Korea made this announcement nine weeks prior, not three weeks.

On March 7, Trump told a Latino group of a Chrysler decision to move production of a truck from Mexico to Michigan, saying, “You saw, two weeks ago, Chrysler announced...” The company made this announcement eight weeks prior, not two weeks. Trump got even more wrong in a speech the next day, saying, “The other day, Chrysler announced...”

In February, Trump phoned a Fox News show and mocked a congressman for getting prank-called by Russian pranksters: “If you look at Adam Schiff, last week, two weeks ago, he got scammed by somebody.” The call happened 10 months prior, not two weeks.

In some cases, using inaccurate dates serves to make Trump look better.

Amid chatter about Oprah Winfrey as a possible presidential candidate, Trump boasted in March that he had appeared “on her last show, or one of the last, I guess the last week.” In fact, he appeared at a decidedly less prestigious time, three and a half months before the show ended. In December, when Trump was trying to minimize the importance of former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who is charged with crimes, he claimed Manafort worked for him for a mere “three and a half months.” It was more than four and a half months.

Trump has been particularly creative in identifying the date at which he claims it was revealed that the U.S. has spent $7 trillion on wars in the Middle East. (In reality, he made up that figure.) In April, he said $7 trillion was correct “as of three months ago,” putting the date in January. In February, he said the figure was correct “as of about two months ago,” putting the date in December. And in December, he said it was true “as of two months ago,” putting the date in October.

Atttaching a fake date to a fake estimate makes it sound more real. There is no good explanation for some of Trump’s other date errors.

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For no apparent reason, the president has even managed to mess up the date of his own political anniversary.

Reminiscing in June 2017 about the speech in which he announced his campaign, Trump told members of Congress, “In three days it’s exactly three years. So we’re very happy about that.”

He launched his campaign in June 2015 — two years prior, not three.

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