Trump’s incessant talk about cognitive tests isn’t reassuring people about his mental fitness

If his public remarks are any indication, few topics are of greater interest to Donald Trump than cognitive tests. The president has long struggled to understand the point of these tests but that hasn’t stopped him from his obsessive boasts about being able to pass exams used to identify dementia, mental deterioration and neurodegenerative diseases.

This Video Is Trending Right Now →

On Friday, for example, Trump spoke to a supportive crowd in Florida, where he went on an extended riff, claiming he’s the only president to have taken a cognitive test, pretending it’s impressive that he’s taken three and insisting Barack Obama would fail such a test.

At one point, Trump actually said, “I mean, you get a guy who gets in there, he’s got a good line of crap. He gets in and all of a sudden you’re stuck with a man who’s a moron. This is not good.”

I’m going to resist the temptation to comment on that quote and will instead note that around the same time, the president suggested some of his own supporters on hand for the event would struggle to answer the questions on the exams he’s taken repeatedly for reasons the White House hasn’t explained.

If it seemed as if Trump was feeling a bit defensive on the issue, it’s easy to understand why. It was just a few weeks ago when The New York Times published a striking report with an unsubtle headline: “Trump’s Erratic Behavior and Extreme Comments Revive Mental Health Debate.” The same article highlighted a lawyer who used to work with Trump, who described the president as “a man who is clearly insane.”

It also noted a recent comment from Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary who worked for Trump in his first term, who wrote online a week earlier that her former boss is “clearly not well.”