Donald Trump had been through a tough week. Gas prices were rising; the Strait of Hormuz was still blocked; King Charles got a better reception from Congress than he did; and his approval numbers were in the low 30s. Feeling the need for some uncritical adoration, Trump decided to go speak to some of his people last Friday, namely the MAGA denizens of The Villages in Florida.
Knowing he was in a safe space, he decided to break out the greatest hits from his campaign speech. For the next 94 minutes, the Villagers listened rapturously to Trump’s rambling blather: low-road attacks on “Sleepy Joe” Biden (who somehow managed not to fall asleep in cabinet meetings) and “Hussein” Obama; claims that the 2020 election was “rigged and stolen;” disparagement of Democrats as “human garbage;” and his ever-popular transgender weight-lifter imitation. Finally, he got around to his oft-repeated story about how he “aced” an “IQ test.”
Trump claimed that he’s taken the test three times, once for each of his three presidencies (not joking), and that it’s a very tough test. “The first question is very easy,” he said. “It’s a lion, a giraffe, a bear, and a shark. They say, ‘Which one is the bear?’” Trump hastened to let the Villagers know that it got much more difficult, and then proceeded to insult his elderly audience. “It’s a very standard test,” he said, “but very tough around those last 10 questions. … A lot of you wouldn’t have been able to answer those.”
How tough? Darn tough. Here’s Trump, verbatim, on one of the final questions: “You know, they say, ‘Take a number, any number.’ ‘Okay, I’ll take 99.’ ‘Multiply it times nine.’ ‘Okay, divide it by three.’ ‘Good.’ ‘Add 4,293.’ ‘Divide by two, subtract 93, divide by nine. What’s your answer?’”
Well, I have to admit that’s a tough one. Someone online did the math and said the answer is 244.666, recurring. And Donald Trump, if we are to believe him, did it all in his head in 10 seconds. “There aren’t a lot of people that get it right,” he assured his audience, “But I got it right.”
Call me cynical, but on a scale of things that never happened, that anecdote is at the very top of my list. It doesn’t take much research to discover that the test that Trump claims to have aced three times is called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), and that it’s not an IQ test. It’s a test to measure cognitive impairment related to depression, schizophrenia, heart failure, substance abuse, and dementia. It’s a test to see how a person’s brain is functioning in regard to “short-term memory, visuospatial abilities, executive functions, attention span, concentration, and working memory.”
The MoCA test does not ask participants to perform complex mathematics problems. And you can’t ace it. If you get a score of 71 out of 100 or higher, the result is called “expected range.” How do I know so much about the test? I registered at the MoCA website and took the MoCA “XpressO” test, an online version of the thing, which puts me ahead of Biden and Obama, I guess.
It started out somewhat as Trump described. In my version, there were outlines of 15 animals and I was instructed to drag five of them to five horizontally placed boxes and remember the order I placed them in. The next question involved placing various circles, triangles, and squares in like patterns as to size and color. There were a couple more of those, then I got asked to place the five animals from the first question in the same order I did earlier. Tricky! But I aced it.
And so it went for 30 timed questions, most of which involved remembering numbers, animals, and shapes from earlier questions and figuring out patterns and sequences. I was hoping to get the famous “Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV,” question, but no such luck.
So why does Trump keep telling this test story? It could stem from his handlers telling him he’s taking an IQ exam and he believes it. Or it could be just another schtick he’s come up with that enables him to rave about his own genius. Either way, it’s dumb as hell. Almost as dumb as those who believe him. For the record, I got a score of 97 on my MoCA exam. So vote for me! Bear. Rabbit. Duck. Hen. Kangaroo.