“Person. Woman. Man. Camera. Television,” Trump said four times in an interview with Fox News, explaining that he was asked to remember and repeat a sequence of words at the beginning and end of the test. “If you put it in order, you get extra points.”
Trump raised the cognitive test after being asked about the health of his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, which Trump and his campaign have frequently questioned as the 2020 election approaches.
It was the last attempt by Trump, 74, to reject questions about his mental acuity while questioning Biden, 77.
Trump raised the cognitive test in an interview with Fox News presenter Sean Hannity earlier this month, alleging that he “recently … passed” a cognitive test before raising it again in another interview with Fox News last week.
In the third Fox News interview on Wednesday, it appeared that Trump was referencing the test he took during a 2018 physical exam, which the White House revealed at the time. But Trump was still confused in the timeline, saying he asked to be tested “less than a year ago” before identifying the doctor he had the conversation with as Dr. Ronny Jackson, who resigned as a White House doctor in spring 2018.
Trump said in consecutive interviews that the last questions on the test become “much more difficult” and said that doctors were impressed that they had gotten the answers correctly.
The Montreal 30-point cognitive assessment takes approximately 10 minutes and asks the patient to complete a simple batch of memory and mental tasks. A high score on the test indicates that the individual does not suffer from mild cognitive dysfunction, but does not indicate that the person has above-average cognitive abilities.
The comments reflected Trump’s continued obsession with portraying himself as someone of above-average intelligence, particularly when critics accuse Trump of being unfit to serve as president.
“They said no one puts it in order. It really isn’t that easy. But for me it was easy,” Trump said, referring to the doctors. “They ask you, they give you five names and you have to repeat them. And that’s fine. If you repeat them out of order, that’s fine, but you know, it’s not that good. But then, when you go back, about 20, 25 minutes later, and they say, go back to that question, they don’t tell you this, go back to that question and repeat it. Can you do it? woman, man, camera, television. ”
.
