Wallace, one of the non-obsequious Fox News personalities, pointed out that the test isn’t particularly difficult. He cited one of the prompts, to simply identify a drawing of an elephant, as an example. The elephant is, of course, the mascot of Trump’s Republican party. Elephants are a common pictorial example of the letter E in kindergarten classrooms, the star of Dumbo, and a zoo mainstay, including at the Smithsonian National Zoo, which gets most of its funding from the federal government Trump leads. So the weird part isn’t that Trump got the question right; it’s that he is so damn proud of it. The test Trump took is the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), which Mashable pointed out is “designed as a rapid screening instrument for mild cognitive dysfunction.” It’s meant to help professionals evaluate different forms of cognitive decline, so “passing” the test — even if you get every question right — isn’t all that impressive because it’s not meant to be difficult for people with intact mental facilities. That Trump thought the last five questions on the MoCA were “very hard” is actually a pretty embarrassing thing for him to say, and the greater indictment of Trump’s personality might be that he doesn’t seem smart enough to know that.
