President Donald Trump admitted that he found a test he took to screen for possible early signs of cognitive decline “very hard.”
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One overnight, the president was attacking Democratic congresswomen Jasmine Crockett of Texas and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York as “low IQ” when he also outed himself for struggling with simple exams.
“Have [Ocasio-Cortez] pass the exams that I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed,” he said. “Those are very hard—they’re really aptitude tests, I guess, in a certain way, but they’re cognitive tests. Let AOC go against Trump. Let Jasmine go against Trump.”
The president’s physician said in a statement in April that Trump’s cognitive functions had been evaluated using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a 30-minute test that screens for signs of dementia.
The test asks respondents to draw a clock, identify pictures of animals, and repeat back a list of five words. According to its creators, the test was designed to detect mild cognitive impairment as early as possible, not to measure intelligence or IQ.
The average toddler can identify pictures of common animals, and most children learn to read an analog clock around age 6 or 7, according to The New York Times.
Trump got a perfect 30-point score on the test in April, according to his doctor, Sean Barbabella.
Speaking to reporters, the president acknowledged the questions at the beginning of the test were not difficult, but he insisted that the questions at the end were harder.
“The first couple of questions are easy—a tiger, an elephant, a giraffe, you know,” he said. “When you get up to about five or six, and then when you get up to 10 and 20 and 25, they couldn’t come close to answering any of those questions.”
A sample test shows that the later questions include things like starting at 60 and subtracting backwards by seven, which is called skip counting, naming words that start with the letter B, describing what a banana and an orange have in common, and repeating the five words from earlier.
Students typically learn to skip count starting in the second or third grade to prepare them for their multiplication tables, as evidenced by the educational standards adopted by states like Wisconsin and California. Similarly, researchers have found that young children are able to differentiate objects by category.
Earlier this month, Trump bragged about his April results to a group of reporters in the Oval Office.
“One of the doctors said he’s almost never seen a perfect score. I had a, had a perfect score. I had the highest score. And that made me feel good,” he said. “There aren’t a lot of people in this room that would get every single question right, I can guarantee you.”
In a legendary Fox News interview, Trump explained how he had aced the test. “It’s like, you’ll go, ‘Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.’ So they’d say, ‘Could you repeat that.’ So I said, ‘Yeah. So it’s person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.’
“It’s actually not that easy. But for me it was easy,” Trump bragged, creating a viral video moment that led to him facing further questions on the difficulty of the test.
In another Fox News appearance later that year, he defended himself in an interview with Chris Wallace, who had taken the test and found it easy.
“I’ll bet you couldn’t even answer the last five questions,” Trump replied, according to The Hill.
It’s not clear if the president repeated the tests during a surprise check-up earlier this month at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
Instead of providing a fairly detailed memorandum of the October visit, Barbabella released a vague summary saying Trump had undergone “preventive health assessments” and remained “in exceptional health, exhibiting strong cardiovascular, pulmonary, neurological, and physical performance.”
For months, the president has faced questions about his physical and mental health. He’s been nursing swollen ankles and heavy bruising on his hands, and experts have warned that his nonsensical speeches and mental lapses are “clinical signs of dementia.”
In the meantime, the president remains fixated on insulting the intelligence of Crockett and Ocasio-Cortez, whom he has attacked twice is as many weeks.
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