Donald Trump once again bragged that he allegedly “aced” a cognitive test administered while he was president, challenged President Joe Biden to take that same test, and then promptly forgot the name of the White House physician who tested him.
The former president has often boasted about his cognitive abilities — including correctly identifying a whale — while also making frequent flubs, including confusing Nancy Pelosi for Nikki Haley. He has also recently said he is running against Barack Obama and misidentified his location as Sioux Falls, South Dakota, when he was actually in Sioux City, Iowa.
On Saturday, at a speech in Detroit, Trump said that Biden “should have to take a cognitive test.” Mere seconds later, he misidentified the doctor who tested his cognition, referring to Republican Rep. Ronny Jackson as “Ronny Johnson.”
“[Biden] doesn’t even know what the word ‘inflation’ means. I think he should take a cognitive test like I did,” Trump said.
Shortly after, Trump added, “Doc Ronny Johnson. Does everyone know Ronny Johnson, congressman from Texas? He was the White House doctor, and he said I was the healthiest president, he feels, in history, so I liked him very much indeed immediately.”
Jackson administered the Montreal Cognitive Assessment to Trump at the president’s request while he was in office. The test, designed to detect memory decline, includes simple tasks such as identifying drawings of animals, remembering terms and random numbers, naming words that begin with a certain letter, and performing abstractions, such as classifying apples and oranges as fruits.
“The first questions are very easy,” Trump said of the test in 2020. “The last questions are much more difficult, like a memory question. It’s like you 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.”
Trump is trying to make Biden’s age a factor in the race, although Trump himself is only three years younger. Meanwhile, Trump’s gaffes and flubs continue.