For the past eight years, the President of the United States has been using a dementia screening test to convince the American public that he is exceptionally intelligent. His lies about it are bizarre and demented, and they have become evidence for the thing he is trying to disprove.
The test is called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or MoCA. It was designed in 1996 to catch early dementia in elderly patients. The test takes ten minutes. Dr. Ziad Nasreddine, the neurologist who created it, has been clear about its purpose: it is not an intelligence test. It never was. Passing it means you probably don’t have dementia. That is all it means.
When Donald Trump calls passing it proof of his genius, he is either lying or delusional. He knows what the test is designed to do. His doctors have told him. Yet, Trump has misrepresented what this test means since 2020, and the lies have not stopped despite repeated correction.
In January 2018, Trump scored 30 out of 30 and declared himself a “very stable genius.” A man who understood what he had just done would know those words make no sense together. The test doesn’t measure genius. It measures (among other things) whether you can identify animals or draw a clock to show 10 minutes after 11 o’clock — basic cognitive functions.
In July 2020, he went on Fox News and performed the test for the cameras. “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV,” he recited, with the deliberate pride of a man who had practiced. “They say, ‘That’s amazing. How did you do that?'” No doctor said that. No doctor would say that. Remembering five words is not amazing. It is the minimum. It is the floor below which you are considered impaired. Trump mistook the floor for the ceiling and went on television to brag about it. That same week he told Chris Wallace the test gets “very hard” at the end and bet Wallace he couldn’t pass it. That’s pathetic.
He even challenged rivals to take the same test. He announced in April 2025 that he’d aced it again. He posted on Truth Social in January 2026 that his rambling, incoherent speech style (which he calls “the weave”) is actually a sign of cognitive superiority, confirmed by the test. The more visibly his sentences fall apart in public, the harder he leans on a ten-minute dementia screen to insist he’s fine.
Then came his comments at The Villages (in Florida) on May 1, 2026, which made me write this article and give it to Mr. Quigley. Trump told the crowd: “No president has ever taken a cognitive test except me. I’ve taken three of them. One in the first administration. They’re hard. The first question is easy. You have a lion, a bear, an alligator, and a squirrel. ‘Which is the squirrel?'”
There is no squirrel on the MoCA. There is no alligator. There is no bear. The animals are a lion, a rhinoceros, and a camel. Trump has taken this test three times by his own account, described it in public for six years, and cannot identify a single animal that appears on it. Just as important, the questions are not designed to be “hard”. They measure basic cognitive function, not intelligence. (Sorry for repeating.)
At the same rally in Florida, he invented an arithmetic problem and presented it as one of the hard questions: multiply 99 by nine, divide by three, add 4,293, divide by two, subtract 93, divide by nine. That problem is not on the MoCA. The actual arithmetic is subtracting seven from one hundred, five times. He made up a question for a test he claims to have aced three times, at a rally where he was trying to prove his superior intelligence.
In a recent Truth Social post he wrote that he had taken the test “three times during my (‘THREE!’) Terms as President.” He has served two terms. He is currently serving the second. He does not know how many terms he has been president.
What am I (or you) supposed to do with this information? Is Trump just lying like a con artist or is he actually demented? I don’t exactly know. The only thing I can think of is that U.S. citizens and people around the world, whether they support him or not, have to be able to confront the fact that this one example (among many) is a sign of a man who is either not well, not honest, or both. We deserve better.
