President Donald Trump appeared to boast about his performance on a dementia screening test while speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One.
The 79-year-old president claimed on Monday, Oct. 27, that he had taken an “IQ test” at Walter Reed Medical Center and challenged Democratic Representatives Jasmine Crockett, 44, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 36, to take the same exam.
“They have Jasmine Crockett, a low IQ person. AOC is low IQ. You give her an IQ test, have her pass, like, the exams that I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed,” Trump said. “I took— Those are very hard— They’re really aptitude tests, I guess, in a certain way, but they’re cognitive tests. Let AOC go against Trump.”
He added, “Let Jasmine go against Trump. I don’t think Jasmine— The first couple questions are easy: a tiger, an elephant, a giraffe, you know. When you get up to about five or six and then when you get up to 10 and 20 and 25, they couldn’t come close to answering any of those questions.”
Trump appeared to be referring to the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, “a 10-minute assessment designed to identify signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s,” according to The New Republic.
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In April, Trump’s physician said in a memo that the president had undergone the MoCA during his annual physical exam at Walter Reed and received a perfect score.
The president was also given the test in 2018, according to NBC News, and reportedly scored 30 out of 30 on that exam as well. In 2020, he challenged then-President Joe Biden to take the same test and later described one of its sections during a Fox News appearance.
“It’s like you’ll go: Person, woman, man, camera, TV,” Trump said at the time. “So they 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 continued, “They say nobody gets it in order, it’s actually not that easy. But for me it was easy. And that’s not an easy question.”
Canadian neurologist Dr. Ziad Nasreddine—who created the MoCA in 1996—told NBC News that the screening was never designed to measure intelligence.
“There are no studies showing that this test is correlated to IQ tests,” Nasreddine said. “The purpose of it was not to determine persons who have a low IQ level. So we cannot say that this test reflects somebody’s IQ.”
Trump returned to Walter Reed earlier this month for another check-up, though it is unclear whether he took the MoCA again. During that visit, the president underwent lab testing, advanced imaging, and “preventive health assessments,” according to a summary of the exam from White House physician Sean Barbabella.
While speaking with reporters on Air Force One Monday, Trump said an MRI he had earlier in the month showed “perfect” results. He did not disclose the reason for the scan.
