Donald Trump, who has a penchant for crowing about hoarding classified documents and the crowd size on Jan. 6, 2021, boasted about acing a basic cognitive test in his continued efforts to prove his self-proclaimed title of an “extremely stable genius.”
During a campaign stop in New Hampshire Wednesday night, the former president touted his ability to correctly identify animals of different shapes. “I took it, and I aced it,” he told the crowd of supporters. “I think it was 35… 30 questions. And let me tell you, you know, they always show you the first one: a giraffe, a tiger or a whale. ‘Which one is the whale?’”
Trump then proceeded to weaponize his very average performance against President Joe Biden, saying he was sure Biden wouldn’t get far on the test — a tactic Trump has leaned into since bragging about the results of his annual physical while still in office. Spawning countless memes, the former president had touted back in 2020 how well he had done on a 10-minute assessment designed to detect mild cognitive impairment (such as early-onset dementia) during an interview with Fox News.
“The first questions are very easy, the last questions are much more difficult. Like a memory question,” Trump preened in the interview. “It’s like, you’ll go, ‘Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.’ So they’d say, ‘Could you repeat that.’ So I said, ‘Yeah. So it’s person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.’”
As Trump supporters stood in the cold waiting for the ex-president to take the stage on Wednesday, the scene echoed his visit to the state just a day before in southern New Hampshire where fans waited in the snow for the presumptive Republican nominee. When speaking Tuesday at the Atkinson Resort & Country Club, Trump lamented that he had to leave the White House after losing the 2020 election and said it “was ridiculous that we had to leave, but we had to leave, we have to follow the laws of our land.”
He quickly doubled down on his 2020 election lies: “They don’t investigate the people that cheated in the election. They investigate the people that understand they cheated and go after them. But they don’t investigate the people who cheated like hell. We have to have fair and free elections.”
Trump, who has achieved the feat of being the only (four-time) indicted former or current president, was charged for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which his own officials at the time claimed was the most secure in U.S. history. As the former president attended legal proceedings for ongoing cases against him, Trump swooped a historic win in Iowa on Monday with 51 percent of the caucus vote, defeating former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis by dozens of percentage points.