Release Trump’s Cognitive Test! Trump Claims He ‘ACED’ It But What Did His Doctor Say?

Former President Donald Trump has been claiming for years that he “ACED” the cognitive testr that nobody asked him to take — but did he? Trump should be forced to produce the results to the tests he claims to have scored perfectly on.

Earlier this week, Trump put out a wild rant on Truth Social in which he again insisted that his repeated gaffes have been deliberate (absurd) and that he did not forget his wife’s name and call her “Mercedes” at CPAC (plausible but beside the point):

They’re constantly making up stories about me because their candidate is a mental and physical basket case. There’s never been anything like it. He’s also the worst president in the history of our country. He went on a very poorly rated show last night [sic] and he talked about Donald Trump and his wife. I don’t know the name of my wife.

He was referring to the fact that, at CPAC, where I had a sold-out speech, the biggest audience they’ve had in years, I think maybe ever, I made the statement that Melania was very popular because when I mentioned her name, the audience went wild. I then looked at the two people – man and wife – Matt and Mercedes Schlapp and I said, “Wow! They really like the [former] First Lady.”

So, this got taken as the fact that I thought Mercedes was the [former] First Lady. Has nothing to do with that. These people are really dishonest. They are absolutely something. They have a horrible candidate who’s a horrible president! They make up things constantly. You take a look at when I use “Barack Hussein Obama,” and I interject him into where it’s supposed to be “Biden,” and I do it purposely for comedic reasons and for sarcasm because a lot of people say that Obama is running the country, not Biden because he’s sleeping all the time. They say, oh, I don’t know the name of the president.

Or when I imitate this guy getting off the stage, what they do is they say, “Oh, he had trouble getting off the stage.” I have no trouble getting up or getting off a stage. Anybody that watches me and what I do at rallies would say, “Wow, that’s amazing. He can go two hours without a teleprompter not making even a little mistake.” Very few people, maybe almost nobody can do what I do.

So, here’s the story. The disinformation of the Democrats is unbelievable. They do it because they have a horrible candidate. Don’t associate me with the mental midget that you portray because I wanna tell you, he should not be leading this country!

Are these the actions of a “stable genius?”

On Thursday, Trump again boasted that he once “ACED” a cognitive test, and asserted “All Presidents, or people wanting to become President, should mandatorily take this test!” in a Truth Social post.

And later, on Thursday night’s edition of Fox News Channel’s Hannity — the same place he first boasted in 2020 that doctors were “surprised” when he “aced” a recent cognitive test — Trump harkened back to the viral moment he made the words “Person, woman, man, camera, TV” famous in another Fox interview.

Trump told Hannity that he got all of the questions right, and they were “very tough”:

But as CNN noted this week, Trump lies so much they have to keep a fact-checker on standby every time he gives a speech. Why would we take his word for it?

Which is not to say that Trump didn’t pass the test. The exam that he was given is not well understood, certainly not by Trump. It is not designed to test someone’s sharpness. It is designed to assess cognitive function if a medical professional has reason to believe that someone has been injured or developed a condition that would affect cognition.

Then-White House physician Dr. Ronny Jackson revealed in 2018 that he did not think cognitive testing was “clinically indicated” but Trump insisted:

I was not going to do a cognitive exam, I had no intention of doing one. The reason that we did the cognitive assessment is, plain and simple, because the President asked me to do it. He came to me and he said, is there something we can do — a test, or some type of screen that we can do — to assess my cognitive ability?

And so I looked into it, and once again — and my initial question was that I didn’t think it was indicated and I didn’t think we should do it. After looking at some of the guidelines, there are a few guidelines out there that lean in the direction of potentially doing it. You know, the Medicare guidelines and some of the NIH, National Institute of Aging — they’ve indicated that it might be a good thing to start doing for most patients in the future.

With that in mind, I went through and I looked at a variety of the cognitive assessments that were available. Most of them were very simple, very short. And I think that’s the goal, actually, for primary care providers, in doing this, is to keep it simple. Keep it short.

We picked one of the ones that was a little bit more involved, it was longer. It was the more difficult one of all of them. It took significantly longer to complete, but the President did exceedingly well on it. So that was not driven at all by any clinical concerns I have; it was driven by the President’s wishes and he did well on it.

President Joe Biden’s doctor similarly says that the test is not medically indicated for the president, but isn’t a clown so he didn’t order a medically-unnecessary test to satisfy another clown.

Now, what Jackson — who has since been outed as an unhinged MAGA acolyte — did not say was that Trump “aced” the test, or got a perfect score. Jackson went out of his way to praise Trump at that press conference — infamously so — yet he did not make that specific claim. Why not?

“He did well on it.”

That’s open to a lot of interpretation. The NIH, whom Jackson cited, cites one study that says anything above 24 is fine:

A 3-class model (normal, mildly impaired, and severely impaired) was found to fit the data best. The normal class averaged a MoCA score of 24, while the severely impaired class averaged a score below 18. For those cases with MoCA scores above 18 and below 24, it is not certain if they are in the normal or the severely impaired classes.

So Trump could have missed six questions and still be said to have “done well.”

And even if he scored lower, Jackson had every reason to claim Trump did well anyway. What’s the downside? It was a medically unnecessary test that he could not be compelled to produce. Weeks after that presser, Trump nominated Jackson to head the VA — which didn’t turn out so well.

The corollary to that, of course, is that there is no upside to releasing the results of such a test. Any normal person bragging about scoring a 30 on this sort of screening would be laughed out of a McDonald’s, let alone the presidency. If Trump were to release the actual results and they showed him scoring something like the average score of 26, it would be an epic humiliation.

But if the media is going to continue to amplify his attacks on the president, using this silly claim, then they should insist he produce those results.

On the separate issue of whether presence should be evaluated for their sharpness, I think KJP has it right, people can see with their own eyes and judge for themselves, the abilities of both men. If someone floated the idea of a substantive competition like Jeopardy! Or a College Bowl-style quiz, as a replacement or supplement for debates that have become fairly useless, I would be all for that.

But to bandy the idea of a cognitive test that people don’t understand as a requirement for the presidency is silly.

Taking the word of a serial liar that he got a perfect score when even his biggest fan wouldn’t come out and say that in a press conference is even sillier.

Show us the test!

Watch above via pool.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.