28 October—Below is an iteration of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) test administered to Donald Trump as part of his recent secondary physical. All the MoCAs are pretty much the same, differing from the one Trump aced in details like drawings to copy and animals to name.

Trump boasted, “I also did a cognitive exam, which is always very risky. . . . And one of the doctors said he’s almost never seen a perfect score. I had a perfect score. I had the highest score. [Of course.] And that made me feel good.” Sounds kind of like a child bragging to his mommy and daddy.

Should we believe Trump’s doctors any more than we believe anything else from or about Trump and his other flunkies?

Anyway, Trump naturally went on extol his own brilliance: “Those are really hard, they’re really aptitude tests, I guess, in a certain way. But they’re cognitive tests. The first couple of questions are easy. A tiger, an elephant, a giraffe, you know.” We won’t burden you with the insults he hurled at his critics in the process, quite as expected, but he brought up their low IQ. Of course.

Actually, the MoCAs are nothing like aptitude tests or IQ tests. Rather, as Trump acknowleged, they’re cognitive tests—screening tools—used to detect decline in functions like memory, attention, language, reasoning, and problem-solving. The maximum—perfect, per Trump—score on a MoCA is 30 and while there’s no pass or fail per se, 26 or higher is generally considered normal cognitive function.

Who’s to say that a lower score fails. Normal is merely a function of statistics, after all.

While the standard MoCA so heroically aced by Trump is specifically aimed at old farts, there are versions for other age groups. But, as you can see from the illustration, a normal child could do as well as Trump on the version to detect cognitive decline in senior citizens—a.k.a. senile dementia.

Incidentally, there’s no record of Joe Biden ever having taken a MoCA. That doesn’t mean he never took one, to be sure. Joe boasted that he had a “cognitive test every single day.” (But never volunteered how he did on it.) And his press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, who has since implicitly recanted in her memoir, told the world that Joe’s doctors determined that he didn’t need a MoCA because he “passes a cognitive test every day” by handling the rigors of the presidency. Sure.

Try it yourself. Nobody else will know . . .