President Trump on Monday bragged about passing a dementia test, while challenging Democrats decades younger than him to try and do the same.
“[We] have a great group of people, which they don’t,” Trump said while taking questions inside Air Force One. “They have Jasmine Crocket, a low-IQ person. [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] is low IQ.… Have her pass, like, the exams that I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed. Those are really hard, they’re really aptitude tests, I guess, in a certain way. But they’re cognitive tests.”
The “cognitive tests” that Trump is bragging about so proudly—and condescendingly telling two outspoken, progressive women of color to take—is most likely some variation of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. The MoCA is a 10-minute assessment designed to identify signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s, and yet Trump talks about it like it was the Graduate Record Examinations or the LSAT.
Trump visited Walter Reed Medical Center earlier this month, raising questions about whether he once again took the dementia test on this visit.
The president has been bragging about this test for years now.
“It was 30 to 35 questions.… The first questions are very easy. The last questions are much more difficult. Like a memory question. It’s, like, you’ll go: Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV. So they say, ‘Could you repeat that?’ So I said, ‘Yeah. It’s: Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV,’” Trump said back in 2020. “They said nobody gets it in order.… It’s actually not that easy, but for me, it was easy.”
“I think it was 35, 30 questions,” he said again last year. “They always show you the first one, like a giraffe, a tiger, or this, or that—a whale. ‘Which one is the whale?’ OK. And that goes on for three or four [questions], and then it gets harder and harder and harder.”
The test itself is controversial within the medical community, and Trump’s misrepresentation of it has been thoroughly debunked over the years.
“It’s a very, very low bar for somebody who carries the nuclear launch codes in their pocket to pass and certainly nothing to brag about,” Jonathan Reiner, a George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences professor and cardiologist, told The Washington Post last year.
And yet Trump, in the midst of a government shutdown, continues to place the MoCA on a pedestal, using it to disparage Representatives Crockett and Ocasio-Cortez even though they could likely pass it with flying colors. Especially if it just consists of “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”
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