Trump's babblings suggest he can't tell Joe Biden from Barack Obama. That's troubling.

Each of us mixes up a name now and again. Forgets something. Confuses one place for another place. As a kid, my mother called me by my brother’s name a time or two (usually when I was up to no good).

So it could have been no big deal when Donald Trump over the weekend mixed up President Joe Biden with former President Barack Obama during a speech.

Trump said Saturday that Russian President Vladimir Putin "has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word. You heard that. Nuclear. He’s starting to talk nuclear weapons today.”

No big deal, right? These things happen no matter how old a person is. Once in a while, at least. Maybe twice.

Trump says his Obama gaffe was sarcasm

But … it’s got to be a little troubling, doesn’t it, when Trump makes the same gaffe more than half a dozen times in a couple of months?

That’s how it’s been. An innocent gaffe has become a disturbing pattern. And elements of the mainstream media are finally paying attention to it and pointing it out.

Want to know how weird Trump is?Just read this transcript.

Forbes magazine documented how Trump has made the same mistake many times recently. It also noted that he seemed to refer to his wife, Melania, as “Mercedes” during an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and that he confused the “very important date” of Michigan’s primary, saying it was Nov. 27 rather than February.

Recognizing that the news media is beginning to pick up on his gaffes, Trump is saying that his Obama/Biden misstatements were meant to be sarcastic.

Trump's mispronounced words, confusion, babblings

That is a difficult explanation to buy, however, when watchdogs like Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of MeidasTouch.com and co-host of the podcast “Uncovered,” post on X, formerly Twitter, what he describes as a “montage of 32 clips from Trump’s two speeches ... where he mispronounced words, got confused, mixed up names, forgot names, and babbled insane nonsense.”

Ask yourself: Wouldn’t this kind of behavior trouble you if it were coming from a member of your family? Your father? Your spouse?

Haley drops out after Super Tuesday.But she and her voters still have a chance to be heroes.

Wouldn’t you be concerned?

There is an obsession in the MAGA media over Biden’s age (though he isn’t that much older than Trump). And outlets like Fox News obsess as well on every gaffe the president makes.

But I don’t believe Biden has come close to doing something like confusing the names of two American presidents so many times over the course of just a few months.

If the right-wing media actually supported Trump, actually believed in him, actually cared about him, they would be reporting this. It would trouble them.

Because it should.

EJ Montini is a columnist at The Arizona Republic/azcentral.com, where this column first published. Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.