President Donald Trump has boasted about his performance on a cognitive screening test—and the doctor who created it is pushing back.
Speaking on Monday at the White House Small Business Summit, Trump said he has taken the Montreal Cognitive Assessment three times and “aced each one,” claiming a doctor told him it was the first time they had seen a perfect score.
He walked through the early questions with characteristic confidence. “The first question is very easy,” he crowed. “You have a lion, a bear, an alligator, and a, what’s another good..? A squirrel. Which is the squirrel?” He then insisted the difficulty ramps up considerably. “By the time you get to the middle, they’re very tough.”
The test’s creator, Canadian neurologist Ziad Nasreddine, has blown up Trump’s claims to brilliance. “It wasn’t designed to be a test of IQ,” he told nine.com.au. “It was designed to assess normal cognitive performance.”
The Montreal Cognitive Assessment is a short clinical screening tool used in roughly 200 countries to detect signs of cognitive impairment, including Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. It includes tasks like drawing a clock, recalling words, and identifying the date and location.
The average score is 26 out of 30. Nasreddine said about ten percent of people of Trump’s age achieve a perfect result. “I think he’s proud that he is able to demonstrate that his cognition is fine,” Nasreddine said.
“Obviously, he likes to maybe boast about it because of his age, and people might think that at his age, you might have more difficulty with your cognition.”
The test is intentionally easy for healthy adults. It is designed to detect deficits—particularly in short-term memory, attention, and language—rather than to measure intelligence. A perfect score confirms the absence of obvious impairment.
It does not indicate exceptional mental ability. Nasreddine also noted the test is intended to be administered by professionals, not self-conducted.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
Trump has called for all presidential candidates to take cognitive tests, noting he is the only sitting president to have done so multiple times. He cited one professional’s reaction to his results: “One doctor said, ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever seen anyone get all questions right.’ That’s a doctor who does this stuff for a living.”
A Washington Post poll published this week found 59 percent of Americans do not believe Trump has the mental sharpness to do his job. Only 40 percent believed he did. The same poll found 55 percent of respondents did not believe he was in good enough physical health to serve.
Joe Biden’s aides, it has been reported, avoided having him take the test over concerns that sitting for it at all could raise doubts about his cognition.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle responded to Trump’s brags by bragging about the president. “President Trump is the sharpest and most accessible President in American history who is working nonstop to solve problems and deliver on his promises, and he remains in excellent health,” he told the Daily Beast.
