Trumps cognitive test

Fresno CA

Description

Like any smart, down-to-earth person, Donald Trump has been bragging about “acing” a simple cognitive test he took recently. He’s been doing it for a while now, but it wasn’t until his interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace one Sunday that he was challenged over it. As the president started boasting about his results, Wallace laughed. “I took the test too when I heard that you passed it,” the Fox News host told Trump. “It’s not – well it’s not the hardest test. They have a picture and it says ‘what’s that’ and it’s an elephant.’” The test is called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), and was created by the neurologist Dr Ziad Nasreddine in 1996. Talking to MarketWatch on Monday, Nasreddine stressed that the test “is supposed to be easy for someone who has no cognitive impairment”, saying that “this is not an IQ test or the level of how a person is extremely skilled or not. The test is supposed to help physicians detect early signs of Alzheimer’s.” Trump is right about the start of the test being easy. But when it comes to the last five questions, his claim that they’re “very hard” is unsettling (although not surprising) in what it reveals about his relationship with reality. (Fox News has been described by academics, media figures, political figures, and watchdog groups as being biased in favor of the Republican Party in its news coverage, as perpetuating conservative bias, and as misleading their audience in relation to science, notably climate change.