UPDATE: About 20 minutes after the publication of the story, Trump posted a sequel saying, "I will name the place and the test, and it will be a tough one. Nobody will come even close to me! We can also throw some physical activity into it."
Donald Trump is still bragging about the so-called "mental acuity test" that he was given by now-Republican Rep. Ronny Jackson (TX).
In a social media post Sunday, the former president bragged that he "aced" his 2020 dementia test, known as "The Montreal Cognitive Assessment" test.
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The attack came for a recent Wall Street Journal poll, conducted in part with one of Trump's own pollsters. Among the questions was about the mental acuity, age, and fitness of candidates Joe Biden and Trump. He's miffed that they asked about him.
"Where did that come from?" he demanded to know. "A few years ago I was the only one to agree to a mental acuity test, & ACED IT. Now that the Globalists at Fox & the WSJ have failed to push their 3rd tier candidate to success, they do this. Well, I hereby challenge Rupert Murdoch & Sons, Biden, WSJ heads, to acuity tests!"
The test didn't actually examine his mental acuity but rather it was something given to monitor cognitive decline over time. In the Fox interview where he discussed it, Trump confessed the memory questions were the most difficult for him.
"The first questions are very easy. The last questions are much more difficult," the ex-president said in the July 22, 2020 interview.
Trump told the network it was the final question where he really struggled the most, ones to do with memory.
"Like a memory question, it would go, like you'll go 'person, woman, man, camera, TV," he continued, noting that if he got it in order he got "extra points."
The test went on, he said, and 10 or 15 minutes later they would ask the first question again and ask him to repeat it.
"They said if you get it in order you get extra points. They said, no one gets it in order. It's actually not that easy, but for me it was easy."
The test is a 30-question, short-answer "test" that is supposed to detect any change in memory. Giving it once doesn't generally give the broad spectrum of how one's cognitive function has changed over time. It's a test designed to be given multiple times and charted how the results might change.
A test for dementia or Alzheimer's is significantly longer, and more detailed, and can also include brain imaging to show whether or not there has been any deterioration, The Alzheimer's Association explained.
Two years later, in April 2022, Trump was still discussing the test, explaining, "I don't like being called stupid." A month later, he was still bragging about passing the test.
It has now been three years, and he continues to discuss 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."
The doctor who developed the cognitive test Trump told the public in 2020 that the questions were "supposed to be easy," because it was testing the change over time.
Dr. Ziad Nasreddine crafted the test in 1996, which is designed to screen for early signs of Alzheimer’s or dementia. During the interview with Trump, Chris Wallace reminded the president that the exam was “not the hardest test” and cited some of the questions. Still, Trump disagreed, insisting that parts of the test were challenging and urged Biden to “take a test right now.”
In the second post, Trump bragged, "I just won the Senior Club Championship at a big golf club, with many very good players."
In the Jan. Senior Club Championship, he bragged he also won, despite not playing the whole first round, Golf Weekly reported.
The championship he "just" won was about three weeks prior and he claimed to shoot 67. To put that in context, "The best score for one round of golf in a PGA Tour tournament is 58. That score has been posted only once so far, and it was by Jim Furyk. Furyk's all-time record round of 58 happened in the final round of the 2016 Travelers Championship at TPC River Highlands in Connecticut," Live About reported.
