LLike any smart, down-to-earth person, Donald Trump has been bragging about “undergoing” a simple cognitive test he recently performed. He’s been doing it for a while, but it wasn’t until his interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace on Sunday that he was challenged for that.
When the President began to brag about his results, Wallace laughed. “I also took the test when I heard you passed it,” the Fox News presenter told Trump. “It is not, well, it is not the most difficult test. They have a photo and it says’ what is that ‘and it’s an elephant.’ ”
This, according to Trump, was “misrepresentation”. “Yes, the first questions are easy,” he admitted. “But I bet you can’t even answer the last five questions. I bet you couldn’t, the last five questions get very difficult. He added: “I guarantee that Joe Biden was unable to answer those questions.”
So what’s the test and the last five questions, as Trump claims, are they really that difficult?
The test is called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and was created by neurologist Dr. Ziad Nasreddine in 1996. Speaking to MarketWatch on Monday, Nasreddine emphasized that the test “is supposed to be easy for someone who doesn’t have cognitive decline,” stressing that “this is not an IQ test or the level of how a person is extremely skilled or not.” The test is supposed to help doctors detect the first signs of Alzheimer’s. “
There are a few different versions of the test with slight variations (like words to remember or animals to name), but the questions are generally the same. We can’t say for sure which version Trump took, but since he said he did recently, I took the latest MoCA test from his website.
Trump is right that starting the test is easy. But when it comes to the last five questions, his claim that they are “very difficult” is disturbing (though not surprising) in what he reveals about their relationship to reality.
But before we dive into that, this is what the test implies:
Drawing a clock and a cube
The first few questions are indeed “easy”, although it goes without saying that anyone experiencing cognitive problems is supposed to find it difficult, and the goal of the test is to help diagnose their condition.
First, you must draw a line between the numbers and their equivalent letters (1 to A, A to 2, 2 to B, etc.). Then you have to draw a cube and a clock at 10:10. Call it what you like: millennium-itis, brain locked, but it was actually a bit of a challenge since I can’t remember the last time I looked at a clock that was not in my phone or laptop. So yeah, it took me a second to remember that the minutes are multiples of five, by 10 beyond the big hand points to two. But in the end I found out, and that’s all that matters.
The ‘elephant’ question
If you are lucky enough to have no cognitive decline, this part is easy too. There are three drawings: a lion, a rhino and a camel. As mentioned, there are some versions of the test with very small differences, for example, the test that Fox News showed during the interview had an elephant (you can see it here), but the last test has a rhino. This has led some of Trump’s critics to unfoundedly assert that he cannot distinguish the difference between the two.
Repeat after me and do some calculations
Both sections are very simple and involve repeating a series of numbers back and forth, and remembering a string of five random words. The final part, which Chris Wallace mentioned, asks you to count from 100 in multiples of seven (100, 93, 86). Like the watch, this took a little longer than I would have liked, but nowhere does it say this is a timed test. In the end I did it, slowly but surely.
The difficulties begin
This is where things get a little troubling.
If you recall, Trump bet Wallace that he “couldn’t even answer the last five questions” of the test. But for a mentally healthy person, the last five questions should be as simple as the rest.
The fifth to last question on the test asks you to repeat a sentence out loud, before naming as many words as you can start with F. In the next “abstraction” section, you need to spot the similarity between different objects like trains and bikes ( modes of transport), or a watch and a ruler (measuring devices).
Next, you should remember the random words that were included in the memory section above. This may be the easiest part to trip over.
And finally, for the orientation part of the test, you have to … say what the date is.
For Trump, stating that these are difficult is troubling because for any cognitively healthy person, they shouldn’t be. But before beginning any chair diagnosis, you must weigh two odds against each other. Is it really likely that the last five questions were difficult for you? Or is he more likely misrepresenting how difficult it was to appear “smarter” than Joe Biden?
In the same interview, Trump had his team pass him a table that he said showed the United States had “one of the lowest death rates in the world,” when it did nothing of the sort. This is shocking, but not surprising: Trump has made more than 20,000 false or misleading claims since he took office.
Therefore, it seems more likely that Trump’s difficulties at the end of the test do not tell us anything that we no longer know. His prolific lie and self-aggrandizement, two things of which we have empirical evidence, should be what concerns us. Because, similarly to his “stable genius” claims, you have to ask yourself: how many intelligent people brag so much about their supposed intellect and in such a wrong way?
.
