The physician who administered the same cognitive screening that President Donald Trump keeps publicly bragging about says he sees something that should worry the country.
Dr. Rob Davidson, head of the Committee to Protect Healthcare, walked former CNN reporter Jim Acosta through the Montreal Cognitive Assessment on Acosta’s show this week. Davidson used the appearance to deliver a pointed message about Trump’s repeated public claims that he has aced the screening multiple times.
The test, Davidson said, is not a routine evaluation that doctors hand to every patient who walks in. It is administered specifically when a provider or a family member has raised a concern about possible cognitive decline. And once is generally enough.
“It is just not typical, right?” Davidson said. “It isn’t typical. It isn’t what you would just generally do for any individual when you didn’t have a concern.”
The MoCA is designed to flag mild cognitive impairment, not measure intelligence or detect full-blown dementia. Davidson described it as a screening for someone who might be “slipping a little bit” and whose loved ones or physician are starting to take notice. It is not a test the average healthy adult ever takes, and it is not a test designed to be repeated for self-congratulatory purposes.
Davidson stopped short of saying Trump has a diagnosable condition, calling that kind of remote evaluation unethical. But he did not soften the impression Trump’s public behavior leaves on him as a physician.
“I won’t make a diagnosis, we don’t, it’s not ethical to try to diagnose somebody,” Davidson said. “And I don’t know if the president has a condition, but something just seems not right.”
He went on to note that Trump’s reported pattern of repeatedly requesting and bragging about the MoCA is itself an unusual data point. White House physicians, Davidson said, are typically not in the habit of administering the same impairment screening over and over to a patient when no clinical concern has been raised. That Trump appears to want to keep taking it, he said, is itself worth noticing.
Acosta has himself been a frequent target of Trump’s attacks, dating back to his days on the White House beat for CNN. He took the test on camera to make the case that no president should be in the position of needing to. By the end of the segment, Acosta was even more alarmed about the president.
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