President Donald Trump has seemingly mistaken a dementia screening for a ‘very hard’ IQ test, as he challenged two Democratic representatives to take the same exam.
On Monday (October 27), the 79-year-old informed reporters on board Air Force One that he’d aced an intelligence test at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C.
According to the New Republic, Trump appeared to be referring to the 10-minute Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), engineered to help ‘identify signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s’.
In his speech, the Republican confronted Jasmine Crockett, 44, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 36, two Democratic representatives, to take the so-called IQ test too.
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"[We] have a great group of people, which they don’t,” he began.
“They have Jasmine Crockett, a low-IQ person. AOC is low IQ. You give her an IQ test, have her pass, like, the exams that I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed," the president said.
"Those are very hard–they're really aptitude tests, I guess, in a certain way, but they're cognitive tests. Let AOC go against Trump.”
"Let Jasmine go against Trump….The first couple questions are easy: a tiger, an elephant, a giraffe, you know. When you get up to about five or six and then when you get up to 10 and 20 and 25, they couldn't come close to answering any of those questions,” he continued.
This isn’t the first time that the 47th POTUS has seemingly bragged about his dementia test results.
In 2020, he told Fox News that MoCA workers asked him ‘30 to 35 questions’ that ranged in difficulty.
“They always show you the first one, like a giraffe, a tiger, or this, or that—a whale. ‘Which one is the whale?’ OK. And that goes on for three or four [questions], and then it gets harder and harder and harder.
“They said nobody gets it in order.… It’s actually not that easy, but for me, it was easy,” he added.
Crockett has since responded to Trump’s ‘low IQ’ jibe, asking CNN what exactly the businessman’s IQ level is.
“He doesn’t even know what a low IQ is. He don’t even know which scores are low, and I can guarantee you that whatever score, if he’s taken one any time recently, I’m sure that his qualifies as low,” the Missouri native retorted.
“He’s never been known to be an Einstein. This is not a guy who got in on merit when it came to going to college.”
She added that she was not ‘worried’ about Trump’s comments and that for the ‘sake of the world’ he would start focusing on his real job, instead of trying to pull her and her fellow Democrats down.
Ocasio-Cortez has also commented on Trump’s IQ claims via a fundraising email, as reported by The Hill.
“Hello, Mr. President!” she wrote. “Out of curiosity, did those doctors ask you to draw a clock by any chance? Was that part hard for you, too? Asking for 340 million people.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s clock comment refers to the MoCA clock drawing test (CDT), which requires the screened individual to draw a clock face with all the numbers and set the hands to a specific time.
The CDT measures several cognitive abilities at once, including attention, hearing comprehension, visual memory, and motor skills, according to Verywell Health.
The inability to do so is a strong indication of mental decline.
Topics: Donald Trump, Health, Politics, US News
Ella Scott