President Donald Trump likes to boast that he’s taken three cognitive tests since being elected to office and has aced them all.
But the 79-year-old president touting multiple assessments is not the sign of genius he might be making it out to be. For some in the medical community, it is actually a red flag.
Trump shared that he had taken a cognitive test during his first term, with a line that went viral where he bragged about being able to remember a series of words: “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”
In recent weeks, he’s brought up having taken multiple cognitive tests and bragged about being able to identify a bear first, then a squirrel.
But the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) is meant to detect signs of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or other conditions, not measure IQ.
“If you have one MoCA, that’s like taking your temperature,” said Dr. Henry David Abraham, professor of psychiatry emeritus at Tufts University School of Medicine. " If a temperature is okay, you don’t come back every 10 minutes and take another temperature. But if it’s not okay, then you want to see where it’s going."
Abraham was careful not to offer a specific diagnosis and noted that the American public simply does not have the results, but Trump’s recent brags about taking the test multiple times raise questions about whether he’s slipping and by how much.
“When they’re repeated that way clinically, we are in fact looking for slippage. We want to know how quickly he’s going down. Has he gone off a cliff?” Abraham said. “We do know that the behavior is worrisome, that they looked at it three times.”
Trump claimed earlier this month that he took the cognitive test after being criticized as dumb.
“You have five doctors lined up. They’re all over the place. I said, ‘Should I take it?’ You know, I’ve had different phases,” Trump said. “They’ve said, ‘He’s a mad genius.’ I didn’t mind that too much. Then they said, ‘He’s a horrible human being.’ I don’t like that much. Then they said, ‘He’s really not a smart person at all.’ I really hated that, so I took a cognitive test,” Trump told a room of supporters in Florida.
But the president’s explanation of the test took a strange turn when he shared what he called one of the easier examples.
“You know, the first question is very easy. It’s a lion, a giraffe, a bear, and a shark. They say, ‘Which one is the bear?’” Trump said. “And everybody says ‘Oooooh.’ Thirty questions. Everyone says, very standard. It’s a very standard test, but very tough around those last 10 questions.”
Trump insisted that many people in the room at The Villages retirement community would not have been able to answer the last ten questions. He also argued President Barack Obama would not have passed it.
Just days later, at the White House, the president boasted again about taking three cognitive tests, during which he dished about another strange question while speaking at a Small Business Summit.
“The first question is very easy,” he declared. “You have a lion, a bear, an alligator, and a, what’s another good..? A squirrel. Which is the squirrel?”
The White House has not released the full details on Trump’s MoCA tests, so it’s not possible to know the truth about whether the president is exhibiting signs of decline, but Trump’s own declarations put the questions front and center.
White House physician Sean Barbabella has not been made available to answer them.
“That’s a political hot potato because suppose transparent Dr. Barbabella came forward and said, ‘Well, yeah, we gave him three MoCAs, because we’re tracking his cognitive function, and it’s been going downhill,’” Abraham explained. “Well, that’s important to know, Dr. Barbabella, how steep is that hill?”
The tests Trump has spent weeks bragging about, he called “serious stuff,” and that the safety of the country needs to be given a higher priority than the president’s right to confidentiality with his medical records.
“I think that pushes us to the edge of what physicians are capable of doing with their professionalism. We can look at the data. We can take histories, we can do exams. I can look at his MRI. I would look at his brain,” Abraham said. “These are questions that really need to be answered, and yet, politically, they are delicate and potentially explosive.”
