President Donald Trump claimed on Monday, Oct. 27, that he had taken a perfect “IQ test” at Walter Reed Medical Center — and challenged Democratic Reps. Jasmine Crockett and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to take it as well. But experts say the test he bragged about isn’t an IQ test at all — it’s a screening for dementia.
“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 told reporters aboard Air Force One. “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 has previously referred to the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), a 10-minute test designed to identify signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s, as his “IQ test,” according to The New Republic.
In April, his physician said Trump had received a perfect score during his annual physical at Walter Reed. He also reportedly scored 30 out of 30 on the exam in 2018, according to NBC News.
In 2020, Trump even challenged former President Joe Biden to take the test and described one section on Fox News.
“It’s like you’ll go: Person, woman, man, camera, TV,” he said. “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 added, “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.”
However, the MoCA is not designed to measure intelligence, Dr. Ziad Nasreddine, a Canadian neurologist who created the test in 1996, told NBC News.
“There are no studies showing that this test is correlated to IQ tests,” he 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’s unclear if he took the MoCA again. During the visit, he underwent lab testing, advanced imaging, and “preventive health assessments,” according to White House physician Sean Barbabella.
Speaking with reporters, Trump also said an MRI he’d undergone earlier this month had shown “perfect” results, though he did not explain why he received the scan.
