Donald Trump describes ‘difficult’ memory test he ‘aced’ to show he’s ‘cognitively there’
- The US president said he took the cognitive test after critics questioned his mental acuity
- ‘It was 30 or 35 questions. The first questions are very easy. The last questions are much more difficult. Like a memory question,’ he said
This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Quint Forgey on politico.com on July 23, 2020.
In an interview with Fox News medical contributor Marc Siegel, the president said he asked his physician upon his last hospital visit “a little less than a year ago” whether there was “some kind of a cognitive test that I could take” in order to “shut these people up”, referring to critics who had questioned his mental acuity.
“It was 30 or 35 questions. The first questions are very easy. The last questions are much more difficult. Like a memory question,” Trump continued. “It’s 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.’ OK, that’s very good. If you get it in order, you get extra points.”
Then, “10 minutes, 15, 20 minutes later” in the cognitive exam, “they say, ‘Remember the first question?’ Not the first, but the tenth question. ‘Give us that again. Can you do that again?’ And you go, ‘person, woman, man, camera, TV,’” Trump recounted.