Donald Trump, the president of the United States, has insisted that a cognitive test he took recently was “difficult”, using the example of a question in which the patient is asked to remember and repeat five words.
“Person, woman, man, camera, TV,” Trump explained, saying that listing the words in order was worth “extra points”, and that he found the task easy.
“They 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 told Fox News medical analyst and New York University professor of medicine Marc K Siegel.
Trump’s description of a cognitive test is mesmerizing pic.twitter.com/Gx4o9HNaXR
— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) July 23, 2020
Trump said that a year ago he asked former White House physician Ronny Jackson whether there was “some kind of cognitive test” he could take, he said, “Because I’ve been hearing about it. Because I want to shut these people up. They’re fake news. They’re making up stories.’”
Trump went on to explain the test, saying that after several questions, the doctor returned to the list of words, asking Trump to repeat them. “And you go, ‘person, woman, man, camera, TV.’ They say, ‘That’s amazing. How did you do that?’ ‘I do it because I have like a good memory? Because I’m cognitively there.’”
One list of words that features on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, the test Trump is referring to, is “Face, velvet, church, daisy, red.”
The president then went on to suggest that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden should take the test.
Over the course of his re-election campaign, Trump has repeatedly attacked Biden’s mental acuity. In one ad, the campaign warns that under the former vice president, “America would become diminished and weak. Just like Biden.” In another, Biden is labelled “old and out of it”.
Trump has repeatedly referred to the cognitive test in recent interviews. Speaking to Fox news host Chris Wallace on Sunday he insisted the last five questions of the test were hard.
“I’ll bet you couldn’t even answer the last five questions. I’ll bet you couldn’t, they get very hard, the last five questions,” he said. “I guarantee you that Joe Biden could not answer those questions.”
