Former President Donald Trump went after President Joe Biden's mental fitness for office again in his speech before a Nebraska crowd. He explained that he scored exceptionally well when given the test by now-Republican Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas.
The reality, however, is that the "test" was hardly a representation of what people with suspected dementia or Alzheimer's disease take. Tests for Alzheimer's or dementia take hours to gather the detail necessary. In the case of Alzheimer's disease, brain scans like MIR or CT are done to rule out other conditions.
"During the Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE), a health professional asks a patient a series of questions designed to test a range of everyday mental skills. The maximum MMSE score is 30 points," the Alzheimer's Association explains. "A score of 20 to 24 suggests mild dementia, 13 to 20 suggests moderate dementia, and less than 12 indicates severe dementia. On average, the MMSE score of a person with Alzheimer's declines about two to four points each year."
Trump's father had Alzheimer's, though studies have shown that if your mother has the disease, you are more likely to develop it than if your father suffered from it.
Experts said at the time that Jackson's test was hardly representative of mental acuity. Instead, they explained the test wasn't definitive, much less diagnostic.
"To test memory, for example, the examiner reads five words at a rate of one per second and asks the subject to repeat them immediately and then again after some time has passed," the report described. "To assess attention and concentration, subjects are read a list of five digits and asked to repeat them in the order they were provided and then in reverse order. The subjects also are asked to count backward from 100 in increments of 7."
Trump notoriously told Fox that the questions were things that he should remember like "person, woman, man, camera, TV." There were five questions a the end of the test that Trump said he found difficult.
"The first few questions are easy, but 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," Trump told to former Fox host Chris Wallace.
The last five questions were posted online, revealing that, in fact, they were remarkably simple. One asked for the naming of animals. Another asked him to recall the words, then read numbers backward. One question asked him to simply repeat the sentences, "I only know that John is the one to help today." Another sentence was "The cat always hid under the couch when dogs were in the room."
Trump still demands that Biden take such a test, but at no point has Trump indicated he would be willing to take a test like that publicly.
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