Trump is still bragging about passing the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) test — you know, that Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.
bullshit he announced as a validation of his brilliance a while back. Only it’s not, and has never been, any kind of intelligence test. And worse, he gets it wrong, he had forgotten the words and order the day of the test, and in every retelling since he is changing the words and exaggerating the difficulty of the test. Now he claims that was asked to multiply 3,293 times four, divide by 3
. Not only do I not believe it, I doubt that he could solve it himself.
But he almost certainly wasn’t asked to repeat Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.
But, much like the phantom whale, Nasreddine said the words in the cognitive testing sequence are supposed to be unrelated, so the MoCA would never have a pair of connected words like “woman” and “man,” or “camera” and “TV.”
Ooops. Flunked it.
It’s designed to be a trivial test to detect serious impairments. No one would celebrate passing it — it’s like expecting to be applauded when an examining doctor finds a heartbeat.
She [Dr Ganguli, an actual physician] added that she did not recall a patient who celebrated passing the test, let alone publicly proclaimed it. “It’s treated with gravitas,” Ganguli said. “If anything, I see the opposite — people disappointed with how they performed.”
Have you ever witnessed someone you love struggle to pass the MoCA test? I have. It’s heartbreaking. Yet here’s this colossal asshole, who my loved one was smart enough to never vote for, acting as if he’s King Shit and claiming he was amazing
at it. Even someone with incipient dementia can see right through him.
I flunked a MoMA test once. No artistic talent whatsoever.
That is the thing about Trump. If he sneezes, it will be the best sneeze ever by anyone in the history of the human race. We need to be thankful he doesn’t talk about his bowel movements.
I took MoCA and it was agonizing because of its implications and how badly I did.
There is no “you got an ‘A'” either. It’s “your memory is about the same” or “your memory is worse.” Since the test is used to assess decline by establishing a baseline the first time and then comparing subsequent runs against the baseline, the first time you take it you are comparing to ‘roughly normal’ and that’s also scary if you come out substantially below ‘average’.
Why did Trump take a test to measure cognitive decline? There is no other reason to take it than to measure how fast you are getting worse, or to compare with roughly normal behavior. It’s absolutely not an IQ test and PZ is correct that the clusters of words you have to remember are not linked like the example Trump keeps spouting. I.e.: he misremembered the example, in fact in a characteristic mode that people with brain damage do.
One of the tests was a list of 25 words you listen to and read back. Then you do some other tests for 5 minutes and are asked to read them back, again. Then, after 30 minutes. And it’s “you’ve got to be kidding me, uh… ‘Sweden’? Uh… that’s it.”
The whole test felt like hours of slamming into a wall of fail over and over. I can’t imagine Trump sat there for 3 hours and experimented with measuring his decline. I bet the question he misremembers so well was the last one he did before he jumped up and huffed out.
His misrememberings – confusing Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi for example, are characteristic. They are both women whose names start with ‘N’. Like a typical dementia patient he gets fixed on ideas (“idee fixe”) that are important to him. For another example, someone indicted with 95 felonies would not normally be chanting about locking anyone up. He’s now locking onto ideas like immunity and squeezing them all he can, because those are the only ideas he can hold on to.
I’m surprised Jack Smith has not asked Judge Chutkan for a competency hearing on Trump, but it appears Smith is playing nice. At his rate of decline Trump won’t be on his feet in 4 years in office or in prison. (Red marks on hands, probably fell down on gravel or pavement) watch Mitch McConnell slowly vanish from public view, too.
Who?
He seems to have already disappeared from public view.
He was always in the news up until his recent fall and freezing episodes in August. Since then, not a whole lot of information.
Another part of the cognitive exam is to draw a clock at 10 past 11. Every year same clock, same time. I told the Doc (ha, talking to myself) that my granddaughter who is being raised in a digital world far removed from bear skins and flint knives wouldn’t be able to complete this test any more than writing her name in Cuneiform!
They stopped asking me to draw a clock after I produced a rounded triangle with 11:10 written in binary at the apex. I told him that the clock was from the planet Gamma Prime where the sentient lifeforms were tri-symmetrical and their world had an eleven hour ten minute day.
@3,4
Pull his head back into his shell?
@stuffin #2
He’s gotta flush 10 or 15 times.
As I may have mentioned before, the doctors being surprised and amazed that he passed the test (as Trump keeps proclaiming) isn’t the brag-worthy point that Trump keeps making it out to be. He’s bragging that the doctors are amazed that he really is that stupid and delusional.
It’s weird to brag about acing a medical diagnostic test that would normally only be administered if there’s a suspected issue and the medical team is trying to figure out what exactly is going wrong.
I was just given this test as part of my yearly exam, when asked to draw a clock I drew the one I am most used to at work which is a twenty-four hour military clock. Not what the examiner was expecting. Threw him off that he never got back to the word game.
@Doc Bill, I’d entertain myself with the clock, were the test administered in my home. Got a square clock with a round face, so I’d test the tester by drawing a purely square clock, mentioning I was making it look like my own clock. See if they catch it.
I also would perform a bit poorly, had enough TBI’s over the course of my military career to offer a money back guarantee of that.
Now, I’m very, very seriously tempted to stop Trump cold with that bullshit. Doing so would be trivially easy and also shoot another harpoon in the wild white whale that is his political ambitions.
Get him to bring up his MoCA assessment, then casually mention how doctors never administer such tests, even upon request, in a complete vacuum of symptoms. They simply won’t. It’s only to be administered when the physician suspects mental impairment. Advising all present of that, yeah, he’d remember that observation and that it’d be brought up each and every time he brought it up and he’d drop it.
Probably to fall back on the Obama time machine, where he blames Obama for things going all the way back to Saint Reagan the heretic.
Here is the standard MoCA sheet: https://www.parkinsons.va.gov/resources/MOCA-Test-English.pdf
It bears little resemblance to Trump’s description.
It would be interesting to test Trump to find out what the hell is wrong with him.
He does not like to read long texts, which implies one of those abbreviation things messing with his ability to learn.
He is also clearly a narcissist, but to what degree?
Maybe a psychopath, and -If yes- to what degree?
I suspect he has a multitude of personality problems, but that does not automatically turn you into a shitty human being.
And on top of this, ageing seems to make him worse.
I had a test like that about five weeks ago. It had some, but not all, of the parts of the test that chrislawson linked to @12.
I’m participating in a study of the effectiveness of prophylactic radiation treatments to keep small cell lung cancer from moving to the brain. One of the possible side effects of the radiation is short-term memory loss. They want to test whether the cure is worse than the disease, and all the data they have is from the 1970s, or something. I was randomized into the control group, so I’m getting everything except the radiation itself. Every three months for two years, I’ll get the test of cognitive abilities along with CT and MRI scans to look for any additional cancer.
The repeat-the-list-of-words part of the test included a lot more than five words; there were ten or fifteen of them, some of them related (I remember “lion” and “tiger”, for example). My performance on that part of the test was nothing to brag about, in part, I guess, because over the years I’ve developed the habit of not memorizing things I could look up.
Another part of the test was one minute to say as many words as you can remember beginning with a given letter. I mostly blocked on those because all I could think of were proper names which weren’t allowed. I now have a strategy for that, though: I’ll begin by picking a second letter which should jog my memory some more. We’ll see how I do next time in the middle of March. (I’ve practiced a bit, and it seems to work.)
The rest of the test was several variations of drawing lines between circles with numbers and/or letters in them, and hitting each in order. I think I did well on that part at least, although that’s still nothing to brag about.
I am so old I recall those ink-blot tests named after that vigilante killer in “Watchmen”.
When Dumpster reported his brilliance on the MoCA he was clearly trying to come up with some words but any words, not the words on the actual test which he probably couldn’t remember. As I recall you could see his beady eyes darting around trying to think of some words to spew out, and the words he came up with described things right in front of him. The first three…person, woman, man…are obvious because there were people standing in front of him, specifically a TV crew with a camera or two.
I would not be surprised to learn that he’s experiencing the onset of dementia or Alzheimer’s, as his father did. It might be mild, but I can attest from my own experience in my mid 70s how difficult it gets to remember something 5 minutes later.
How do the testers avoid a subjective component when designing the tests? It seems to me it must be very hard to get consistent accuracy for whatever they are measuring.
If you have no other accomplishments or talents to tout, of course you would manufacture BS about your supposed accomplishments. It’s one of the defining characteristics of NPD.
What has he actually accomplished? He’s a failure as a businessman (he’d have more money if he’d just stuck his inheritance in index funds and left them alone; instead he has a breathtaking number of bankruptcies and his name is synonymous with risible, crap products), as a husband (divorced twice and his current wife clearly can’t stand him), as a father (his kids can’t stand him but like his money), as a president (read the news), as a human.
Of course he’s going to make BS up in a pathetic attempt to cover up all his increasingly blatant failures.
As someone who has to sit with my father through these tests as his mind continues to deteriorate, I would heartily wish for Trump to go and fuck himself. He is an asshole and a sociopath and I do not believe a word he says. Not to mention that just because he passed the test a few years ago is no guarantee he would pass it again. The onset of mental decline can be very sudden and he has had a lot of stress lately, with criminal justice finally catching up with him.
@birgerjohansson, AFAIK, these tests are not supposed to be super accurate, they are indicative of a possible problem that might require subsequent more precise diagnosis. For example, people with Alzheimer’s usually fail at those drawing challenges rather badly, but people with dementia can pass those reasonably well.
birgerjohansson:
How do the testers avoid a subjective component when designing the tests? It seems to me it must be very hard to get consistent accuracy for whatever they are measuring.
They use the same test, and it’s OK because all its for is measuring your own present performance against your past. It’s not measuring “Intelligence” just recall. So if a question was cultural, it doesn’t really matter. Fictional example: “these are the names of Odin’s ravens, repeat them back to me.” And 5 minutes and 30 minutes later, repeat them back again. Now, I actually know the names and could rattle them off from memory, in which case the test is comparing my current long term recall against my old long term recall. But suppose I had massive brain injury? I might not be able to recall the names even then. Or suppose I knew no norse mythology, then it’s comparing my past short term memory to long term conversion with my current. [by the way, that’s where my damage is…] it’s also subjectively looking for confabulation as a sign of memory loss. If I said the ravens were named, uhhhh… Tom and Jerry it indicates that there is loss (because I answered right 2 years ago) and that I’m still responding, I just can no longer assess whether my answers are correct. That’s why it’s interesting that Trump confabulated Nikki Haley as being responsible for capitol security Jan 6. He’s just throwing out names of ${woman I hate} because his dementia is so severe he confuses world war 2 and world war 3.
His movements show indications of ataxia, and those marks on his hand are probably from falling down. There is also the diapers – incontinence is an outcome of brain damage, too.
My guess is that his shit’s all apart up there and the republicans know it, will just try to get him in so his VP can run the show – they are stuck with unelectables otherwise. Of course the show runner for this season is setting both characters up to die dramatically. (Anyone see The Man back in the day) oh, the drama!
Re: Marcus Ranum @ #20…
But are you looking for Hugin and Munin or Thought and Memory? Or will either pair work in response to the question? (And, no, I didn’t look them up, either.)
The “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.” moment is one of many, but a good emblematic one, that left me wondering how this guy still has any followers.
Hopefully many of us remember the rather divisibility rule for 3; so “multiply 3,293 times four, divide by 3” clearly can’t yield a whole number.
—
I concur with the consensus here that, over time, it has become harder to know whether ostensible stupidity by Trump is merely performative or genuine. The implication is obvious.
@23
True, and TFG is presenting “multiply 3,293 times four, divide by 3” as if it were a very complex and challenging process. Even if someone doesn’t know the divisibility rule for 3, it’s not hard to do in your head (especially if you divide by 3 first). It’s just another mark of his ignorance and inability.
Apropos of this theme, Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter tonight talks about some of the weird stuff Trump said in New Hampshire, such as apparently confusing Nikki Hailey with Nancy Pelosi. In her newsletter Richardson says “Observers have been saying for a while now that once Trump had to start appearing in public, his apparent cognitive decline would surprise those who haven’t been paying attention.” She then offers this quote from Trump in New Hampshire on Wednesday, “We’re…going to place strong protections to stop banks and regulators from trying to debank you from your—you know, your political beliefs, what they do. They want to debank you, and we’re going to debank—think of this. They want to take away your rights. They want to take away your country. The things they’re doing. All electric cars.”
@25 Well now I might actually have to watch the debates. Or “debates”, since none of the candidates seem capable of doing anything more than babbling talking points like a collection of deranged parrots, devoid of grammar, nuance and context.
I have the disquieting feeling that the presidential debates between Biden and Trump will resemble nothing so much as a slap fight between superannuated senior citizens at the senior citizen day care center.
@silvrhalide #26:
Can’t we just hide the TV remote from both of them? Tell them the ice cream is being served in the small room at the far end of the long hallway? Or just hit the fire alarm while they’re bickering and get the paramedics to haul them off for a lengthy smoke inhalation check-up and observation?
Rich: cf. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/18/man-jailed-for-record-50-years-for-criticising-thai-monarchy
Whatever the US is right now, it’s not that.
No King. Not yet, anyway.
Way I see it, did his enablers/handlers and he his way, Trump would be King, and his children his dynasty, conveniently young enough to outlive the decrepit orange one yet weak enough of character and ability to be a useful figurehead. The MAGAs would just love that.
(Mind you, I live half a world away and only go by what I see and read)
@12. chrislawson : From that MOCA test sample (under language) :
Asking for F words? That seems like its asking for trouble.. Still could be worse.
About Trump in the Republican narrative, see link.
As Beau mentions, the Republicans would paint Trump as dement before admitting he did treason, and, by extention that the lie they all fed to the Republican base really is a lie.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=iIZQPOu4zrY
@27 Nahhh… just put the cordless phone handset next to the TV remote. Since the handset is generally bigger, the idiots will most likely grab that one (esp. if TFG beats Biden to the grab). Then sit back and watch the idiots try and operate the TV with the phone. Watch them fight and argue with each other about how the other one “is doing it wrong, give it to me, I’ll show you how to do it”, etc.
Better still, video it and post it to Insta/TikTok/YouTube.
Not entirely relevant here, but I saw a sample page of what is said to be the test in question, and really come to question, not the status of those taking it, but the intelligence of those making it.
The test begins with two things in the same box. One is a diagram of letters and numbers, with a suggested order, and the other is a drawing of a cube, with the command to copy the cube. Now I know I’m getting old and goofy and all, but it took me way longer than it ought to to realize that in a test in which separate tasks are separated into separate boxes, this box contained not one test but two. So I sat there wondering if this was some kind of parody of a test. Obviously you can’t join the letters and numbers to form a cube, but what the hell do they want? My mistake of course was to assume that in a test so simple, so heavily vetted and often used, a failure to comprehend what the test was trying to do would be my failure, not theirs.
I can draw a clock and think of a million F words, even clean ones, but thinking like a tester is a challenge.
So when he confused Nicky Haley with Nancy Pelosi I asked my partner “You know, that was probably just a slip of the tongue and it does happen you know; after all, Biden once referred to ‘Ukraine’ as ‘Iraq’ and that certainly doesn’t mean he confused the two. Should I be fair and not hold this against him”. She said “Pfff… this is Donald Trump! A man who smears everyone every chance he gets. He gets no sympathy from me and we should hold everything against him.” I decided she was right. But mainly when a sane person makes a slip of the tongue they usually correct themselves and express the error. As Trump can never admit a mistake no matter how natural he’d tie it into some weird alternate reality where he did mean Nicky Healey and somehow Nicky Haley should have done something about Jan 6 security…. So… yeah, no sympathy after all. A gibbering demented lunatic through and through.
Trump hates reading. People who have worked with him in the past on his TV show tell how he had trouble reading cue cards. Trump is dyslexic. Noel Casler who worked on The Apprentice this caused a lot of grief on that program. It would set of towering rages from Trump on occasion when he could not read some words such as arbitrage.
I don’t know much about the test – thanks to chrislawson for posting it – but I’m almost certain no matter what numbers they give me, my response will be: 8 6 7 5 3 0 9
When I read cheerfulcharlie’s post I can’t help but think of how Trump feels for his people when “They sacrifice every day for the furniture and future of their children.” Them chairs don’t buy themselves y’know. And they will be more expensive as time goes on.
Matthew Currie@22– These tests are not meant to be taken by oneself alone. They’re meant to be taken with a health professional’s involvement, who will clarify instructions or point to the correct working area so long as they’re not prompting the answers. It will be interesting to see if the questions need to change when the generation that grew up with digital clocks starts cognitive screening.
Charly@19– Absolutely right. These are designed as screening tests for cognitive impairment and should not be considered diagnostic. Unfortunately, by being the default test, the MoCA and the MMS have become standards used to determine how well treatment works in clinical trials, which then become standards used by insurers and government agencies to determine treatment eligibility. The same unfortunate process has led to screening tools like the K10 for depression being used as an outcome measure for treatment.
Allegedly, one of the questions in a MoCA-type test in the UK is or was “Who is the Prime Minister?”, but they had to temporarily replace that during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, because even people who couldn’t remember their own name got it right!
Criminal, conman, defendant, guilty, prisoner
Also, never out of the news cycle. As this very post demonstrates.
(Fame, infamy, notoriety, scandalous, acclaimed)