It is, unfortunately, a patten I am very familiar with from a personal perspective.
My spouse has been diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (for years - I now suspect it is diabetes-related, but the cause is not important).
For years she has spun tall tales, and once she has said it out loud once no one can dissuade her that it is just a tall tale.
Our daughter (below age 2) had suspected UTI as a child and they needed a sample. She peed on the examining table. The resident did try to suction up some with a tube (bad enough), but the story my spouse tells is that he got a straw and used his mouth to suck it up.
My spouse's grandmother died of a UTI. Prior to that time, she was responsive, but not coherent. When we entered the room she would turn toward us and try to speak. It came out ba-ba-ba-ba, but she was conscious and responded to everyone who entered and tried to communicate even though she couldn't form words. My spouse insists her grandmother was comatose, which is why my SIL decided not to treat her final UTI. I've told her she's wrong but she refuses to believe it. More recently, she said that in the presence of at least two sisters - who looked at her like she had lost her mind. They told her she is wrong - but she insists her grandmother was comatose for months (or possibly even years) before she died.
The most bizarre "memory" is from traveling, where not only the events are off - but she believes something which happened to me actually happened to her. Some kids in the Soviet Union approached me and said something in stilted English - I don't recall what it is, but just kids trying out a language they didn't know well. In my spouse's memory, they approached **her** and said, "Hey, what's happening? (like they were copying a phrase they had seen on TV and trying to be slick)"
It was clear to me that she really "remembers" all of these (and more) that way - and truly believes she is accurately reciting events. Mostly I try to live in her world, unless the story she is telling could harm someone (e.g. the reputation of the local Children's hospital in the first instance). Her stories are entertaining (like many of Trump's are to people looking for a good story) - so people enjoy them and, for the most part, there isn't any reason to correct her.
My understanding that she really believes her memory was objectively confirmed when she had an extensive battery of tests for dementia. One of the tasks was to look at a picture and draw it from memory. During the second and third (at least) sessions, she had to draw the same picture from memory. In the first redrawing, she messed a few things up. Every subsequent redrawing was line-for-line a copy of her first inaccurate memory - which is the exact same thing I had been seeing for a couple of years at that point.
Suffice it to say - it is scary how much I see of my spouse's cognitive impairment I see in Trump.
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