Former President Donald Trump once again boasted to Sean Hannity about acing a cognitive test, famously known for the phrase “Person, woman, man, camera, TV.” In a post on Truth Social, Trump claimed that all presidents or those aspiring to be should mandatorily take this cognitive test. During an interview on Fox News Channel’s Hannity, Trump reiterated his success on the cognitive test and emphasized that the questions were very tough.
Trump responded to Hannity’s skepticism about President Biden’s ability to sit down for an interview by bringing up his own cognitive tests. He argued that Biden wouldn’t be capable of handling such an exchange and stressed the importance of a cognitive test for a president. Although Trump acknowledged that some consider it unconstitutional, he proudly declared that he took two cognitive tests and aced both.
According to Trump, the cognitive assessments are not easy, especially the questions toward the end, which he described as very tough. He mentioned that Ronny Jackson, then-White House physician, also took one of these tests. Despite initially expressing doubts about the need for a cognitive test, Jackson administered it at Trump’s request. Trump insisted that the test was not prompted by clinical concerns but by his own wish to assess his cognitive ability. He claimed that he did exceedingly well on the more involved and longer cognitive assessment.
This recent reference to Trump’s cognitive test success appears to be part of his ongoing effort to highlight his mental acuity and question the cognitive abilities of his political rivals, including President Biden.
I was not going to do a cognitive exam, I had no intention of doing one. The reason that we did the cognitive assessment is, plain and simple, because the President asked me to do it. He came to me and he said, is there something we can do — a test, or some type of screen that we can do — to assess my cognitive ability?
And so I looked into it, and once again — and my initial question was that I didn’t think it was indicated and I didn’t think we should do it. After looking at some of the guidelines, there are a few guidelines out there that lean in the direction of potentially doing it. You know, the Medicare guidelines and some of the NIH, National Institute of Aging — they’ve indicated that it might be a good thing to start doing for most patients in the future.
With that in mind, I went through and I looked at a variety of the cognitive assessments that were available. Most of them were very simple, very short. And I think that’s the goal, actually, for primary care providers, in doing this, is to keep it simple. Keep it short.
We picked one of the ones that was a little bit more involved, it was longer. It was the more difficult one of all of them. It took significantly longer to complete, but the President did exceedingly well on it. So that was not driven at all by any clinical concerns I have; it was driven by the President’s wishes and he did well on it.
