Donald Trump just breezed through another cognitive exam. The astonishing wow-factor needed to pass this one? Remembering five words.
The president claimed “genius” status at a Wednesday rally in Bullhead City, Arizona for accomplishing the apparently gargantuan task.
“Five words, oh they mock me for this, oh, nobody up there could do any of these things,” Trump said, pointing ahead of him.
“They give me five words. They say, ‘Sir, we’re going to give you five words. We would like you to repeat those words, preferably in order.’ What they don’t say is, at the end of the test a half hour later, they do it again, so you don’t know the—” the president gently trailed off before barking: “Five words: Hat. Hair. Logo. White. Black,” insisting he “got them right.”
“A half hour goes by, they ask you 25-30 other questions—‘sir, in the middle of the test we asked you about five words. Will you please repeat them again, ideally in order? You will get points if you get them all,’” Trump recalled, ruminating for a moment on how many “points” he acquired.
Trump said he repeated the words again, allegedly causing the testers to exclaim, “Holy shit.”
“Nobody can do that,” Trump insisted. “They say very few people can do that, but almost none can do them in order like that. But I can. You know why? Because I’m a freakin’ genius.”
At another point, Trump shared that he was asked to do some basic arithmetic as a part of the procedure. “I got it right. Nobody gets it right,” Trump insisted as his audience cheered him on.
Trump took his first publicly documented cognitive exam in 2018 to waylay concerns about his alarming mental state, but the simple tests have seemingly become a point of pride for the 80-year-old.
In the years since he first “aced” the exam, Trump has invariably tweaked the questions he said he received on the test, at times bragging that he had correctly recited five words and performed basic multiplication while at other times insisting that he had passed thanks to correctly identifying a whale. In years past, the test’s authors claim that none of the versions in circulation actually had a whale on them.
But it doesn’t take much to impress crowds at a Trump rally these days. At a midterm campaign stop in Tennessee on Saturday, the president boasted to his supporters that he “could say the stupidest things and you’d clap.” Spoiler alert: they did.