Former President Donald Trump’s performance on a test of his mental acuity was questioned on Fox News on Wednesday by Democratic strategist Jessica Tarlov.
Tarlov, a co-host of Fox News’ The Five, appeared to question the importance of the cognitive test the former president often mentions and said is administered to people who’ve been in “traumatic accidents.”
Trump has often cited the test, which he took while president, and has previously told Fox News host Sean Hannity in 2020 that he had “aced” the cognitive exam, while the test appears to have been administered in 2018.
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Tarlov was responding to a comment from Jeanine Pirro, another co-host and a former judge, who also mentioned President Joe Biden, whose own mental acuity has been the subject of speculation in recent months.
“Trump took a mental acuity test and aced it. Why won’t Biden?” Pirro asked.
“Well, this mental acuity test, which included identifying animals and counting backwards by a factor of seven, is something to give to people who have been in traumatic accidents,” Tarlov said.
Video of Tarlov’s remarks was shared to X, formerly Twitter, by user Acyn, who is senior digital editor for MeidasTouch, which describes itself as “a pro-democracy news network.” It was founded by the same people responsible for the MeidasTouch political action committee (PAC) opposed to Trump’s re-election in 2020.
Newsweek reached out to the Trump campaign via email outside of office hours for comment.
Tarlov also cited Trump’s 2020 comments where he described part of the test he took.
“It was 30 or 35 questions. The first questions are very easy. The last questions are much more difficult. Like a memory question,” Trump told Fox News medical contributor Marc Siegel in 2020.
“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,” the former president said.
“I proved I was all there because I aced it. I aced the test,” Trump told Hannity on July 9, 2020, adding that he had taken the cognitive test at Walter Reed National Medical Center “very recently.”
Trump told Hannity that the doctors “were very surprised.”
“They said, that’s an unbelievable thing. Rarely does anybody do what you just did,” he said.
Trump’s description of the test was very similar to questions on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), which is designed to assess whether a person has cognitive impairments. The questions appear simple—such as asking the person to draw a clock showing 11:10—but they test for problems that might occur in the early stages of dementia
In June 2021, 14 Republican members of the House of Representatives, including former White House physician Ronny Jackson, signed a letter calling on Biden to take a MoCA test and claimed the president was experiencing “mental decline.”
As White House physician in 2018, Jackson told reporters that Trump had received a perfect score on a cognitive test and said there was “no reason whatsoever to think the president has any issues whatsoever with his thought processes.”
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.