Trump insists basic cognitive test was difficult: ‘Person, woman, man, camera, TV’

Despite ridicule, president appears to still be obsessed by his performance on a test used to screen for signs of dementia

Donald Trump has yet again boasted of his performance on an elementary test designed to screen for early signs of dementia — this time demonstrating one of the easier tasks during a White House interview.

Speaking to Fox News medical contributor Dr Marc Siegel, Mr Trump described asking a doctor if there was “some kind of cognitive test” he could take to dispel “fake news” about his mental health. He then described one of the exercises he was given, a memory test.

“It’s like you’ll go ‘person, woman, man, camera, TV’. So they’ll say ‘could you repeat that?’ So I said ‘yeah’. So it’s person, woman, man, camera, TV. Okay, that’s very good …

“If you get it in order you get extra points. He said nobody gets it in order, it’s actually not that easy, but for me, it was easy. And that’s not an easy question.”

Continuing his monologue about the exercise, Mr Trump described the examiners saying “that’s amazing! How did you do that?”, answering “I do it because I have, like, a good memory. Because I’m cognitively there”.

Mr Trump’s demonstration of the test was roundly mocked on social media, with Daily Show host Trevor Noah rendering the president’s list of words as a parody of the Meredith Brooks song “Bitch”.

The test Mr Trump took is the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which is commonly used for people thought to be at risk of cognitive decline. While Mr Trump took the test some time ago now, his fixation on his supposedly exceptional performance appears to have intensified of late — paralleling the release of two books separately challenging his psychological integrity and intelligence, as well as a persistent failure to make up ground lost to rival Joe Biden.

Mr Trump has been polling well behind his Democratic opponent for months, and his campaign is struggling to generate effective new lines of attack. The “Sleepy Joe” epithet the president coined months ago may not have helped him regain ground, but he is evidently still comfortable using it as he ridicules Mr Biden’s supposed senility.

The president dug into the theme in the Wednesday interview, insisting “something’s going on” with Mr Biden and that the US president needs to be “sharp” to deal with the likes of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“You don’t have any non-sharp people that you’re dealing with, and we can’t have somebody that’s not 100 per cent.”

The president met some head-on resistance to his narrative of cognitive primacy last Sunday, when he sat for an interview with another Fox News host, Chris Wallace.

Mr Wallace mentioned to him that in a recent Fox News poll, Mr Biden had outpolled him on competence and soundness of mind. When Mr Trump responded by again trumpeting his test results, Mr Wallace pointed out that the questions included identifying a picture of an elephant and counting back from 100 in increments of seven.

Mr Trump was unmoved: “I’ll guarantee you that Joe Biden could not answer those questions.”

For his part, Mr Biden has declined to engage in any debate over his own mental faculties. Asked earlier this month whether he has taken a similar test, he said he has — and brushed any concerns aside.

“Look, all you gotta do is watch me,” he said, “and I can hardly wait to compare my cognitive capability to the cognitive capability of the man I’m running against.”

This piece originally misstated one of the questions on Mr Trump's cognitive test. The question asks the subject to count backwards from 100 in increments of seven.