Not all of Mr. Trump’s misrepresentations come from watching TV. Sometimes he attributes something to a private conversation that may not have ever occurred.

That happened in October when the president was defending the contents of a reconstructed transcript of his July 25 conversation with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. The call prompted a whistle-blower complaint that led to the impeachment inquiry. Mr. Trump told reporters that Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, had told him after he read the transcript that it “was the most innocent phone call that I’ve read.”

Mr. McConnell later denied making the comment, saying at a news conference that he had “not had any conversations on that subject” with Mr. Trump.

But other Republicans have said nothing when Mr. Trump appeared to have wrongly quoted them. The president said, for example, that Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, had described the call as “perfect” — a word the president uses repeatedly to describe his own conduct.

If Mr. Scott also used that word, it wasn’t in public.

“We’ve all seen it. We saw the transcript, we saw what the whistle-blower put out. I don’t see what they’re talking about,” Mr. Scott had said on Fox News, defending the president but not using his chosen word, “perfect.”

Mr. Scott’s office did not respond to a request for comment. The White House also did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Trump’s habit of putting words in the mouths of others are not just limited to impeachment.

In a tweet on October 20, Mr. Trump quoted his defense secretary, Mark T. Esper, as saying that the cease-fire in Turkey was “holding up very nicely. There are some minor skirmishes that have ended quickly. New areas being resettled with Kurds. U.S. soldiers are not in combat or ceasefire zone. We have secured the Oil.”