Trump's plan to attack Joe Biden's mental fitness has backfired spectacularly: Washington Post reporter

President Donald Trump has tried waging a campaign aimed at questioning former Vice President Joe Biden's mental fitness -- but it seems to have backfired spectacularly.

Washington Post reporter Philip Bump writes that Trump's clumsy attacks on Biden's mental acuity have only led the president to repeatedly make bizarre boasts about his own purported completion of a dementia test that, among other things, asked him whether he could properly identify an elephant.

"This bizarre insistence that he is particularly good at this test dropped the president into a spiral of his own creation: bemused reactions about his crowing led to more questions about it and more boasting from Trump," writes Bump.

Trump's boast about acing the dementia test reached a new peak during a Fox News interview this week in which the president demonstrated his ability to repeat back five separate words -- in this case, "person, woman, man, camera, TV" -- in their proper order.

"So here we are, with Trump spending an extended period of time repeating five words in a television interview by way of proving how mentally sharp he is," writes Bump. "As for his campaign’s goal of getting people talking about Biden? It’s not working as intended... Even on Fox itself, there have been seven days this month when Trump was more of a topic of conversation in the context of mental capacity and capabilities than Biden."