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Donald Trump has once again bragged about his performance on a primary test designed to detect early signs of dementia, this time demonstrating one of the easiest tasks during an interview at the White House.
Speaking to Fox News medical associate Dr. Marc Siegel, Trump described asking a doctor if there was “some kind of cognitive test” he could perform to dispel “false news” about his mental health. Then he described one of the exercises they gave him, a memory test.
“It is as if you were ‘person, woman, man, camera, television.’ Then they will say ‘could you repeat that?’ So I said ‘yes’. So it is person, woman, man, camera, television. Okay, that’s very good …
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“If you get it, you get extra points. He said that nobody puts it in order, it’s not really that easy, but for me it was easy. And that is not an easy question.
Continuing his monologue on exercise, Trump described the examiners saying “that’s amazing! How did you do that?” Responding: “I do it because I have, like, a good memory. Because I’m cognitively there.”
Trump’s demonstration of the test was outraged on social media, with Daily program Host Trevor Noah introduces the President’s word list as parody from the Meredith Brooks song “Female dog“
The test Trump took is the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which is commonly used for people who consider themselves at risk for cognitive decline. While Trump did the test some time ago, his fixation on his supposedly exceptional performance seems to have intensified of late, in parallel with the release of two books that separately challenge his psychological integrity and intelligence, as well as a persistent failure to regain ground. lost to rival Joe Biden.
Trump has been surveying far behind his Democratic opponent for months, and his campaign is struggling to generate effective new lines of attack. The epithet “Sleepy Joe” that the president coined months ago may not have helped him regain ground, but he is evidently still comfortable wearing it while ridiculing Biden’s alleged senility.
The president elaborated on the subject in Wednesday’s interview, insisting that “something is happening” with Biden and that the President of the United States must be “astute” in dealing with people like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“You don’t have unsharp people that you’re dealing with, and we can’t have someone who is not 100 percent.”
The president encountered some frontal resistance to his cognitive primacy narrative last Sunday, when he sat down for an interview with another Fox News presenter, Chris Wallace.
Wallace mentioned to him that in a recent Fox News poll, Biden had surpassed him for competition and mental solidity. When Mr. Trump responded again by announcing his test results, Wallace noted that the questions included identifying an image of an elephant and counting seven numbers from 100.
Trump was unmoved: “I guarantee that Joe Biden was unable to answer those questions.”
For his part, Biden has refused to participate in any debate about his own mental faculties. When asked earlier this month if he had performed a similar test, he said yes, and dismissed any concerns.
“Look, all you have to do is look at me,” he said, “and I can’t wait to compare my cognitive ability with the cognitive ability of the man I’m running against.”
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