President Donald Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Friday evening that as part of his annual physical, he took a cognitive test.
“I got every answer right,” he announced.
Having spent several hours at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center earlier in the day, undergoing a variety of tests for his physical, the president then headed to Joint Base Andrews for the flight down to Palm Beach, where he is spending the weekend.
Speaking with the White House traveling pool accompanying him to Florida, Trump fielded questions on a number of topics but was keen to talk about his tests.
“I think I did well,” the president said, adding that the report on his health would be released Sunday.
“Overall I felt I was in very good shape. Good heart. A good soul. Very good soul. I took — I wanted to be a little different than Biden. I took a cognitive test. I don’t know what to tell you other than I got every answer right,” Trump said.
Asked to say more about the cognitive test by one reporter, the president was asked, “Was it: Man, Woman, Person, Camera, TV?” — a reference to his discussions about a previous cognitive test in his first term in office ahead of the 2020 election, specifically a portion in which he was asked to recall a list.
Perhaps not appearing to get the reference, Trump, 78, said: “I think it’s a pretty well-known test. Whatever it is. I got every one right.”
The president has spoken often about cognitive tests, especially in reference to former President Joe Biden — the only commander-in-chief older than he is.
Trump’s apparent obsession with cognitive tests — specifically, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment he took during his first administration designed to screen for early signs of dementia — has often been ridiculed.
One part of the test requires participants to repeat a short list of words.
Speaking to Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel in 2020, Trump explained: “It’s like you’ll go ‘person, woman, man, camera, TV.’ So they’ll say ‘Could you repeat that?’ So I said ‘yeah’. So it’s: person, woman, man, camera, TV. Okay, that’s very good …”
If “you get it in order you get extra points. He said nobody gets it in order, it’s actually not that easy, but for me, it was easy. And that’s not an easy question,” he insisted.
Continuing his monologue about the exercise, Trump described the examiners saying, “That’s amazing! How did you do that?’” answering, “I do it because I have, like, a good memory. Because I’m cognitively there.”
Dr. Ziad Nasreddine, who developed and copyrighted the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test in 1996, said anyone with functioning cognitive abilities should be able to pass it.
"This is not an IQ test or the level of how a person is extremely skilled or not,” Nasreddine told MarketWatch in 2020. “The test is supposed to help physicians detect early signs of Alzheimer's, and it became very popular because it was a short test, and very sensitive for early impairment.”
The test is a 10-minute examination and includes questions that are meant to test different parts of the brain for cognitive function. Questions include identifying drawings of animals and asking subjects to draw a picture of an analog clock and draw the hands to a specific time.
The president’s insistence that he gets great marks and amazes examiners in a test that any cogent person should be able to pass continued through the 2024 election campaign.
In October, not long after boasting that he had “aced” two cognitive tests, Trump bizarrely impersonated a duck during a town hall in Pennsylvania, replacing “quack” with repetitions of “frack.”
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