During his speech at a convention of Turning Point Action in Detroit this weekend, Donald Trump suggested that Joe Biden should take a “cognitive test,” which would have been quite the jab if he hadn’t confused the name of the doctor who’d administer the test in his very next sentence.
A big part of preemptive GOP nominee Trump’s campaign has been playing up President Biden’s age — 81 years — as a hindrance to effectively performing his duties for a second term. But now it seems it is Trump — who just celebrated his 78th birthday on Friday — who is the one fumbling his words.
The doctor who the former president was trying to refer to in his speech is Texas Republican Rep. Ronny Jackson, a White House physician who was part of Trump’s presidency — referred to with his characteristic conviction as Doctor “Ronny Johnson.”
“He doesn’t even know what the word ‘inflation’ means. I think he should take a cognitive test like I did,” Trump said of Biden.
“Doc Ronny Johnson. Does everyone know Ronny Johnson, congressman from Texas? He was the White House doctor and he said I was the healthiest president, he feels, in history. So I liked him very much indeed, immediately.”
Back in 2018, Jackson told reporters that Trump took the cognitive test on his own accord. The test, called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, is designed to detect mild cognitive impairments like early signs of memory loss, NPR reported.
The cognitive assessment entails remembering a list of spoken words; listening to and repeating a list of random numbers backward; naming as many words that begin with a specific letter, say "B," in a minute; drawing a cube accurately; and describing ways in which two objects are alike, NPR reported.
It is curious how such an ability to recall a list of, say groceries, would aid President Biden in defining “inflation” better.
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