The president figured Democratic Reps. Jasmine Crockett and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wouldn’t match his performance on a cognitive screening.
Donald Trump was in a boastful mood aboard Air Force One, chatting with reporters about a “very hard” IQ test he aced at Walter Reed Medical Center. The 79-year-old president then threw down the gauntlet to two younger Democratic congresswomen—Jasmine Crockett, 44, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 36—saying they’d never come close to his results.
“They have Jasmine Crockett, a low-IQ person. AOC is low IQ,” Trump said on October 27. “You give her an IQ test, have her pass, like, the exams that I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed. Those are very hard—they’re really aptitude tests, I guess, in a certain way, but they’re cognitive tests. Let AOC go against Trump. Let Jasmine go against Trump.”
He went on, describing the test like a memory game that gets tougher as it progresses. “I don’t think Jasmine—the first couple questions are easy: a tiger, an elephant, a giraffe, you know. When you get up to about five or six and then when you get up to 10 and 20 and 25,
they couldn’t come close to answering any of those questions.”
What Trump was actually talking about is the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), a quick 10-minute screening tool doctors use to spot early signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s—not an intelligence measure. His personal physician confirmed in April that Trump scored a perfect 30 out of 30 during his annual physical at Walter Reed. He’d done the same back in 2018, and even bragged about it on Fox News in 2020, recalling one part: “It’s like you’ll go: Person, woman, man, camera, TV… If you get it in order, you get extra points.” He insisted, “Nobody gets it in order, it’s actually not that easy. But for me it was easy.”
The test’s creator, Canadian neurologist Dr. Ziad Nasreddine, has made it clear the MoCA isn’t linked to IQ at all. “There are no studies showing that this test is correlated to IQ tests,” he told NBC News. “The purpose of it was not to determine persons who have a low IQ level. So we cannot say that this test reflects somebody’s IQ.”
Trump had another check-up at Walter Reed earlier this month, complete with lab work, advanced imaging, and preventive screenings, according to his White House physician, Sean Barbabella. It’s unclear if he took the MoCA again then, but the president did mention a recent MRI came back “perfect,” without explaining why it was ordered.