President Donald Trump was served with a pitying fact check on his latest boast about acing a cognitive test.
The 79-year-old president appeared to struggle to keep his eyes open during a lengthy cabinet meeting Thursday as his top officials gave updates about the Iran war and other areas under their purview, and Trump maundered about pens, the White House ballroom and his cognitive abilities once it was his turn to speak, reported The Daily Beast.
“I’m the only president that ever took a cognitive test,” Trump told his top officials. “I took it three times. It’s actually a very hard test for a lot of people. It wasn’t hard for me.”
“It’s a cognitive test," he continued. "It starts off with an easy question, and by the time you get to the middle, it gets tougher. By the time you get to the end, very few people can answer those questions. They get very tough mathematical equations and things. I took it three times. I aced it all three times in front of numerous doctors that I have no idea who they are.”
The president then bragged that one of those doctors told him he was the first person he had seen complete the test without missing a single question in his 20 years of administering them, but social media posts reporting on his claims attracted a community note adding context about the assessment.
“The MoCA test Trump refers to is a 10-minute screening tool for mild cognitive impairment that people with normal cognition easily pass,” read a community note posted by social media users. “It includes basic tasks like serial subtraction (100-7 repeatedly), not complex mathematical equations.”
Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok also appended fact checks on posts about Trump's boasts.
“The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) is a quick 10-15 min clinical screening tool for mild cognitive impairment in older adults,” Grok posted. “It begins with easy tasks (naming animals, drawing a clock) then adds attention/memory items like serial 7s subtraction from 100 — not complex equations.”
“Trump first took it in 2018 during his annual physical amid public questions about his mental fitness (he scored 30/30)," Grok added. "He’s repeated it voluntarily during later exams (three times total per his recent statements) to demonstrate and emphasize passing each time.”
Dick Cheney's former cardiologist, Dr. Jonathan Reiner, questioned why Trump's advisers haven't called on him to stop bragging about the cognitive test, which he repeatedly seems to conflate with an IQ test.
“If I were one of the president’s advisers, I would beg him to stop bragging about doing well on a dementia screening tool which requires the patient to identify a camel and subtract 7 from 100,” Reiner posted on X.
