The cable news media has disgracefully blacked out President Donald Trump’s stunning rant about his latest cognitive test — which he now falsely equates with an I.Q. test — in a failure that illustrates the state of journalism in Trump’s second term.
Trump spoke to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Japan on Monday, during which he went on a rant that included a new falsehood about the cognitive test he’s been bragging about for years, as well as a few slips and fumbles that cut against his boasts:
TRUMP: They have Jasmine Crockett, a low IQ person. They have uh… AOC’s low IQ. You give her an IQ test… have her pass, like the exams that I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed. I took … 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. I don’t think Jasmine… the first couple of questions are easy: a tiger, an elephant, a giraffe, you know. 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.
There’s a lot packed into that two-and-a-half minutes. For example, the president is asked if he’s not ruling something out and tells the reporters
He attacked Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) by asserting that neither of them could manage the mentally Herculean task of answering questions deep into the test — a shocking assertion at both ends. We’ll get to that.
But the most stunning part of this rant is that Trump claims — and appears to sincerely believe — that this assessment is an “aptitude” test that measures something akin to an Intelligence Quotient (IQ).
The facts around the exam are well-known and have been for years. In 2020, Trump boasted to Fox News host Sean Hannity that doctors were “surprised” when he “aced” a recent cognitive test, a remark that drew mockery which reached historic proportions after immortalized the words “person woman man camera TV” while boasting about his keen cognitive powers during an interview with Fox News’ Dr. Marc Siegel.
The test is called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MOCA), which Trump first took as president in 2018 according to then-White House physician Dr. Ronny Jackson.
At a now-infamous press conference, Dr. Jackson told reporters that Trump had scored a “30 over 30” on the MOCA, and that the test was not “clinically indicated,” but Trump insisted on taking it.
The test is used to screen for mild cognitive issues, and
- Connecting lettered and numbered dots in order
- Drawing a cube
- Drawing a clock (These tasks are worth up to five points)
- Correctly identifying pictures of a lion, a rhinoceros, and a camel (up to 3 points)
- Recalling a list of five words (no points)
- Reading a list of numbers (2 points)
- Reading a list of letters (1 point)
- Counting backwards from 100 by sevens (3 points)
- Repeating the phrases “I only know that John is the one to help today” and “The cat always hid under the couch when dogs were in the room. (2 points)
- Explaining the similarities between objects like “train – bicycle” and “watch – ruler” (2 points)
- Recalling the five words from earlier in the test, in any order (5 points)
- Knowing where you are, and what the date, time, and day of the week are. (6 points!)
There are several versions of the assessment, none of which actually has a question “number 25.”
But the question that correlates roughly to the section Trump identifies as really tough to answer consists of being able to tell the examiner the current “date, month, year, place, and city.”
Bragging about “acing” this test is like passing a field sobriety test and telling everyone you aced a physical fitness test.
But the only mention you would hear from cable or broadcast news
Where’s Daniel Dale? Where’s Jake Tapper? Where is anybody to point out that Trump thinks it takes a mental Superman to repeat back the sentence “The child walked his dog in the park after midnight.”
A conspiratorial-minded person might connect the dots between this failure and things like NBC parent company Comcast donating to Trump’s ballroom fund, or CNN’s CEO reportedly telling staff to ease up on reporting on it, to name a few recent examples.
Trump has the news media running scared, and lucky for us it doesn’t take a genius to see that. Journalists of conscience at these outlets need to grow a spine and speak out.
Watch above via C-SPAN.