by Hal Brown, MSW
“So Shower Heads, You Take a Shower, the Water Doesn’t Come Out. You Wanna Wash Your Hands, the Water Doesn’t Come Out…Dishwashers, You Didn’t Have Any Water…In Most Places of the Country, Water Is Not a Problem. They Don’t Know What Do With It. It’s Called Rain.”
He also said that his hair has to be perfect.
This may go down in history as one of the most ridiculous statements a president has ever made to tout his accomplishments after three and a half years in office.
Trump apparently equates brain size with a high IQ. A sperm whale has the largest brain, up to 20 pounds, of any mammal . Trump also said he’s a stable genius, I suppose differentiating himself from geniuses who were unstable.
Just to be snarky I made a test where instead of naming three kinds of animals the subject is asked to name three things involving water. I wanted to share my idea so I put it on Twitter, but then I figured why not build a diary around it? After all, everything I write can't offer profound original observations like my story Trump is Mr. Creosote.
As a clinical social worker and psychotherapist I was never trained in cognitive testing.
From USA Today
President Donald Trump has taken up the strategy of attacking former Vice President Joe Biden's mental status, while defending his own, during the 2020 election, and in a new round of criticisms is touting his results of a standard cognitive functioning test.
In a contentious interview with Fox News' Chris Wallace that aired Sunday, Trump again claimed he got a perfect score on a test of his cognitive ability and said that former Biden "could not answer those questions."
Wallace cited a recent Fox poll of voters that found Biden has a slight edge over Trump when it comes to perceived mental soundness for presidency.
"Let's take a test right now. Let's go down, Joe and I will take a test. Let him take the same test that I took," Trump said.
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"Well it's not the hardest test. There's a picture and it says, 'What's that?' And it's an elephant," Wallace said to Trump.
"No, no, no," Trump said. "See, that's all misrepresentation."
Trump went on to say that while the first few questions are easy, the last five are "very hard." "I'll bet you couldn't even answer the last five questions," he said.
Here’s what the one person, Dr. Ziad Nasreddine, who can claim to be the top expert on the test had to say. He designed the test (Market Watch):
“This is not an IQ test or the level of how a person is extremely skilled or not,” Nasreddine agreed in a call with MarketWatch. “The test is supposed to help physicians detect early signs of Alzheimer’s, and it became very popular because it was a short test, and very sensitive for early impairment.”
More pointedly, Market Watch included what a psychologist and a doctor who use the test tweeted:
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Trump and the MOCA test is really old news. On Jan. 17, 2018 I wrote about the possibility Trump cheated when he first took the test. After that news came out apparently so many people were trying to look at the website for the test that below is what came up when you tried to find it online.
This is the gist of what I wrote:
If I was a Trump advisor and wanted to help him put aside the rampant speculation about his being in the early stages of dementia, I would have suggested has ask to be tested during his physical.
Then I would check online to determine which were the most likely tests would be used. The MoCA is one of two commonly used tests, the other being the Mini–Mental State Examination (MMSE).
I would have the president practice both tests, hoping he’d be given the MoCA because the examiner is allowed the flexibility to customize some of the questions on the MMSE (the naming objects questions for example).
Assuming that the doctor didn’t customize the MoCA, Trump could have taken the test repeatedly until he could answer all the questions.
I would have suggested Trump get a couple of questions wrong to avoid suspicion, but of course he would ignore this advice wanting to brag about getting 30 out of 30 right.
The matter of judging just how intelligent Trump really is has been addressed in articles since he began to make inflated claims about his brilliance. Recently The New Republic published He Is Even Dumber Than We Thought — Four years in office have only convinced more Americans that the Trump might not be a stable genius.
This article begins:
A Washington Post–ABC News poll taken the last week of May 2020 asked Americans, “Do you think Trump has the mental sharpness it takes to serve effectively as president?” Fifty-two percent of respondents said no, with only 46 percent saying yes.
One might see this solid majority response as the weary, off-the-cuff judgment of an American public worn down by Trump’s barrage of outlandish claims about coronavirus treatments, or fantasized accounts of legions of violent antifa leaders orchestrating the present nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd. (Indeed, since that poll’s release, it was reported that Trump mistakenly tried to register to vote in his newly adopted home state of Florida using an out-of-state address.) But in truth, this was far from the first poll to find that a substantial number of Americans see Trump as not very bright. An Economist/YouGov poll in 2019 asked, “Compared to other presidents since World War II, would you say that Trump is more or less intelligent?” Forty-seven percent said that he is less intelligent, 22 percent said he has about the same intelligence, and just 21 percent thought he is more intelligent.
The article ends with a 2017 quote from Erick Erickson, a former CEO of the popular rightwing Redstate.com website from an OpEd he wrote in The Washington Post.
“The president exudes incompetence and instability. Divulging classified information to the Russians through bragging; undermining his staff’s defense of his conduct through inane tweets; even reportedly asking the FBI director to suspend an investigation of a former adviser—all these strike me not so much as malicious but as the ignorant actions of an overwhelmed man. Republicans excuse this behavior as Trump being Trump, but that will only embolden voters who seek greater accountability to choose further change over stability. The sad reality is that the greatest defense of the president available at this point is one his team could never give on the record: He is an idiot who does not know any better.”
and the New Republic concludes:
And that’s the assessment of an ideological fellow traveler; as the polling results and unvarnished assessments of global diplomats suggest that the president is not merely “overwhelmed” and that the idiot defense for his chronic incompetence and misconduct is more than a simply rhetorical tactic. With the Trump presidency, H.L. Mencken’s 1920 prediction that one day the White House “will be adorned by a downright moron” has now come true.