President Donald Trump regularly boasts about his “cognitive test,” and after doing so in the cabinet meeting on Thursday, he is facing mockery from X users. At the time, Trump was ranting about California Governor Gavin Newsom’s admission that he had dyslexia. While addressing this, Trump once again brought up the favorable results of a basic cognitive test aimed at detecting dementia in older people.
“I’m the only President who ever took a cognitive test. I took it three times. It’s actually a very hard test for a lot of people. It wasn’t hard for me. But it’s a cognitive test,” Trump said during the meeting. “It starts off with an easy question. And by the time you get to the middle, it gets tougher. By the time you get to the end, very few people can answer those questions. They get very tough mathematical equations and things,” he continued.
Trump was referring to the White House Medical Unit physician’s use of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. The president underwent an exam in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the Cabinet meeting on Thursday, Trump told assembled administration and the press that he had “aced it three times in front of numerous doctors” while having that examination. He further claimed that Dr. Ronnie Jackson had warned him that if he had a poor result, it would be leaked to the press.
“But I aced it. I got them all right,” Trump said. This wasn’t the first time that the President cited that assessment as evidence of his fitness for office in a July 2020 interview with Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel. At the time of the examination, he was ridiculed by commentators for talking on and on about how difficult the test was. Trump then recited the list of words he had been asked to remember: “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”
Trump: “I’m the only president that ever took a cognitive test. I took it 3 times. It’s actually a very hard test for a lot of people. It wasn’t hard for me. It starts off with an easy question and by the time you get to the middle it gets tougher — mathematical equations and… pic.twitter.com/4FFivCvytA
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 26, 2026
However, this time around, his bragging about his cognitive test results was met with fact-checks from X (formerly Twitter) users, who gave him a community note revealing that the test isn’t an IQ test or a measure of intelligence.
The community note described Trump’s assessment as “a 10-minute screening tool for mild cognitive impairment that people with normal cognition easily pass.” It also noted that the test includes tasks such as “serial subtraction” and not “complex mathematical equations” as Trump had suggested.
According to the Daily Beast, X users asked the social media platform’s Grok chatbot to check Trump’s claim, to which the chatbot responded that the assessment is “a quick 10-15 min clinical screening tool for mild cognitive impairment in older adults.”
“It begins with easy tasks (naming animals, drawing a clock) then adds attention/memory items like serial 7s subtraction from 100 – not complex equations,” Grok added.
Meanwhile, during the Fox News interview in 2020, the President claimed that the test was “not that easy” for most people, but boasted that, for him, it was basic.
“And that’s not an easy question. In other words, they ask it to you, they give you five names and you have to repeat ’em. And that’s OK. If you repeat ’em out of order, it’s OK, but, you know, it’s not as good. But when you go back about 20, 25 minutes later and they say go back to that — they don’t tell you this – ‘Go back to that question and repeat ’em, can you do it?’ And you go: ‘Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV,’” Trump said.
