Cognitive Test. Trump. Biden. Campaign. Flashpoint.
WASHINGTON — It doesn't quite have the ring of “Morning in America” and “I Like Ike.”
But the phrase “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.” is getting an unlikely moment in the spotlight as President Donald Trump has taken a detour into the politics of dementia three months before the election.
Trump, 74, attempted to demonstrate his mental fitness by reciting five words — in order, importantly — over and over in a television interview broadcast Wednesday night. The Republican president said that collection of nouns, or ones like them, was part of a cognitive test he had aced while declaring that his likely Democratic opponent, 77-year-old Joe Biden, could not do the same.
In a battle of septuagenarians, the Trump campaign has long tried to paint Biden as having lost some of his mental sharpness. But the gambit has yet to prove successful in denting the former vice president's standing in the race. That leaves Trump trying to escalate the attacks while defending his own ability to handle the mental rigors of the job.
“The first questions are very easy,” Trump told Fox News. “The last questions are much more difficult. Like a memory question. It's, like, you'll go: Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV. So they say, `Could you repeat that?' So I said, `Yeah. It's: Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.'”
He then recalled that, at the end of the test, the doctor asked him to recite it again.
“And you go: ` Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.' If you get it in order, you get extra points,” Trump said. “They said nobody gets it in order. It's actually not that easy, but for me, it was easy.”
Trump boasted that he dazzled the doctors because he has “a good memory, because I'm cognitively there” and delivered an unsubtle accusation about Biden.
“Now Joe should take that test because something's going on,” Trump said. “And, I say this with respect. I mean — going to probably happen to all of us, right? You know? It's going to happen.”
The subject of smarts — especially his own — has long fascinated the president.
Trump has been known to declare that he is “a very stable genius” and that “I have the best words” while noting that he attended the prestigious Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. And about a month ago, he began telling aides that a cognitive test he took as part of his physical in 2018 could be something he could weaponize against Biden.
But some of Trump' s descriptions about the test and what it means don't quite fit with what experts describe about the most common of cognitive tests given to older people. There is no bonus, and it's meant to be easy, said Dr. James Gal vin, a University of Miami professor of neurology who runs a dementia center.
Galvin said what Trump described sounds an awful lot like the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, often called MoCa. It takes about 10 minutes, and the top score is 30, said Galvin, who has administrated thousands of the tests.
The Mo Ca“isa screening test ,” Galvin said. “It's not a diagnostic test. And more importantly, it's not an IQ test. It doesn't tell how smart someone is. It's designed to be a relatively easy test because what you want to do is pick up people who have problems or possible problems.”
The last questions are not the hardest for most people, and they are usually naming the day of the week, date, month, year and where the person being tested is, Galvin said. The test does not get harder as it goes along but measures different parts of cognition, like memory, attention, spatial awareness and language. Additionally, the words the president cited would not be grouped together because they are allin some way related to one another, he said.