One of President Donald Trump’s favorite pieces of false lore about himself has gotten him into a bit of a pickle with X users after he repeated it during a cabinet meeting on Thursday.
He was in the midst of a rant about California Governor Gavin Newsom’s admission that he has dyslexia during an appearance several months ago when, unprompted, he brought up his favorable results on a basic test meant to detect dementia in older adults.
“I’m the only president that ever took a cognitive test. I took it three times. It’s actually a very hard test for a lot of people. It wasn’t hard for me. But it’s a cognitive test,” Trump said.
“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.”
The president was referring to White House Medical Unit physicians’ use of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment during an exam he underwent six years ago, in 2020 amidst the Covid-19 pandemic.
He told members of his cabinet and the assembled press Thursday that he’d “aced it three times in front of numerous doctors” during that examination and claimed his then-physician, Dr. Ronnie Jackson, warned him that a poor result would have leaked to the press.
“But I aced it. I got them all right,” Trump said.
It was the latest in a series of incidents where he’s cited the assessment as evidence of his fitness for office, dating to a July 2020 interview with Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel.
At the time, he drew ridicule from commentators when he went on and on about how difficult the test was and repeated a list of words doctors had asked him to remember: “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”
But Trump’s most recent invocation of his tests result was quickly met with fact checks from X users in the form of a community note which points out that the test isn’t an IQ test or a measure of intelligence.
Instead, the note described the assessment as “a 10-minute screening tool for mild cognitive impairment that people with normal cognition easily pass” and noted that it includes tasks such as “serial subtraction” and not “complex mathematical equations” as Trump had suggested.
Users also asked X’s Grok chatbot to check the president’s claim, at which point the Elon Musk-backed AI model replied that the assessment is “a quick 10-15 min clinical screening tool for mild cognitive impairment in older adults.”
“It begins with easy tasks (naming animals, drawing a clock) then adds attention/memory items like serial 7s subtraction from 100—not complex equations,” Grok added.
The test also includes other basic tasks such as asking patients to draw a clock, to identify drawings of animals and to name the date, month, year and place where they are being tested.
During his 2020 Fox News interview, Trump actually claimed that the test was “not that easy” for most people while boasting that it was, in fact, basic for him.
“And that’s not an easy question. In other words, they ask it to you, they give you five names and you have to repeat ’em. And that’s OK. If you repeat ’em out of order, it’s OK, but, you know, it’s not as good. But when you go back about 20, 25 minutes later and they say go back to that — they don’t tell you this — ‘Go back to that question and repeat ’em, can you do it?’ And you go: ‘Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV,’” he said.
