In a new interview with Fox News, President Trump again repeated what is becoming his proudest triumph as president — allegedly passing a test for cognitive impairment. (We don’t know that Trump passed the test; the only corroboration is his former doctor, Ronny Jackson, who is obviously beholden to the president whose endorsement set up his new career.) The test Trump took is not a test for geniuses. Its questions, such as pointing to a picture of an elephant and saying “elephant,” are designed to screen for dementia. But Trump took pains to note that some of the questions are harder. Several days ago he insisted to Chris Wallace, “I’ll bet you couldn’t even answer the last five questions.” Now he has revealed the most difficult of these questions.
“The last questions are much more difficult,” he said. “Like a memory question. It’s, uh, like you’ll go, ‘Person, woman, man, camera, TV.’ So they say, ‘Could you repeat that?’ So I said, ‘Yeah.’ So it’s ‘person, woman, man, camera, TV.’ ‘Okay, that’s very good.’”
It seems perhaps unfair, given Trump’s hours of daily television consumption, that 40 percent of the words he had to repeat involved television. Nonetheless, it is an achievement. Of sorts. Though I would argue that Chris Wallace probably could repeat those words as well.
“The doctors said very few people can do that, very few people get that,” Trump elaborated, with evident pride. It seems as if the actual test here is whether or not a person who passes the dementia screening boasts about his performance in public as if it is proof of his genius, rather than evidence that his doctors suspected he is suffering serious cognitive impairment.
