Trump Gets Hammered With Punishing Community Note After New ‘Cognitive’ Rant

 

President Donald Trump got hammered with an embarrassing “community note” after his new rant about acing a cognitive test three times went viral.

Trump has spent years bragging about his performance on a test called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MOCA), which begins, as Trump himself has noted, with tasks like identifying animal drawings and progresses to a climax of knowing where you are and what day it is.

Over the years, it has become clear that Trump falsely equates the assessment with an “aptitude” or IQ test.

The president held a lengthy and, as one commentator put it, “completely insane” cabinet meeting on Thursday, during which his proficiency at the “mind test” came up again — with a new claim:

 PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I’m the only president that ever took a cognitive test. I took it three times. It’s actually a very hard test for a lot of people. It wasn’t hard for me. But it’s a cognitive test. It starts off with an easy question. And by the time you get to the middle, it gets tougher. By the time you get to the end, very few people can answer those questions. They get very tough mathematical equations and things.

I took it three times. I aced it all three times in front of numerous doctors that I have no idea who they are. And I was told when I went in — they said Dr. Ronnie told me this. My current doctors are fantastic doctors. They said, “Well, if you take it — you know, it’s Walter Reed. It’s essentially a public hospital. And if you do badly, he’s probably going to get out.” But I aced it. I got them all right. And one doctor said, “I’ve never seen anybody get them all right. I’ve been doing the test for twenty years.”

Trump has described many elements of the test in the past, but the claim about “very tough mathematical equations and things” is new. As we have reported many times, there are several versions of the MoCA test, but they all contain the same basic elements — and no “very tough mathematical equations and things.”

Unless “things” means “knowing what day it is and where you are.”

Viral clips of Trump’s rant are now being appended with a community note addressing the “equations” claim:

The MoCA test Trump refers to is a 10-minute screening tool for mild cognitive impairment that people with normal cognition easily pass; it includes basic tasks like serial subtraction (100-7 repeatedly), not complex mathematical equations.

Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok also fact-checked Trump, writing “The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) is a quick 10-15 min clinical screening tool for mild cognitive impairment in older adults. It begins with easy tasks (naming animals, drawing a clock) then adds attention/memory items like serial 7s subtraction from 100—not complex equations.”

Watch above via White House press pool.

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