Copyright hellomagazine
Donald Trump may have opened the floodgates when it comes to concerns about his health and mental acuity. Though the president has long been famously secretive about his health (among other things, like his tax records and plans to demolish the White House East Wing), he is certainly not shy when it comes to boasting about his alleged good standing, including the suggestion that he is 6'3 and 224 pounds. Most recently, he boasted about taking an IQ test, however one that has since been identified as a possible test to identify signs of dementia or Alzheimer's. Speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One over the weekend, Trump challenged Democratic Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett to take the supposed IQ test he also took. "They have Jasmine Crockett, a low IQ person. AOC is low IQ. You give her an IQ test, have her pass, like, the exams that I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed." "I took — those are very hard — they're really aptitude tests, I guess, in a certain way, but they're cognitive tests. Let AOC go against Trump," he continued. "Let Jasmine go against Trump. I don't think Jasmine — the first couple questions are easy: a tiger, an elephant, a giraffe, you know. When you get up to about five or six and then when you get up to 10 and 20 and 25, they couldn't come close to answering any of those questions." According to The New Republic, Trump appeared to be describing the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which in April his physician said in a memo he had taken, and allegedly got a perfect 30 out of 30 score. Trump has bragged about acing the MoCA test several times over the years, however Dr. Ziad Nasreddine, who created the test in 1996, warned it should not be used to measure intelligence. A score of greater than 26 is considered normal, while 18-25 is considered mild cognitive impairment, 10-17 is considered moderate cognitive impairment, and a score less than 10 is considered severe cognitive impairment. "There are no studies showing that this test is correlated to IQ tests," Dr. Nasreddine told NBC News in 2020, maintaining: "The purpose of it was not to determine persons who have a low IQ level. So we cannot say that this test reflects somebody's IQ." In another recent health update, earlier this month, Trump's physician confirmed that he had received both a COVID-19 booster shot and his flu shot, which his own Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has shifted away from recommending. Moreover, in July, Trump acquiesced to giving more rare insight into his health — notably, while most headlines about him were about his relationship with late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein — after the size of his swollen ankles raised concern. After undergoing a "comprehensive examination, including diagnostic vascular studies" with the White House Medical Unit, per his Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, he was diagnosed with "chronic venous insufficiency, ICD-9, a common condition, particularly in individuals over the age of 70," per a note from his physician, Capt. Sean Barbabella. The note maintained there was "no evidence of deep vein thrombosis or arterial disease," and that Trump's lab testing was all "within normal limits." He also underwent an echocardiogram, which found "no signs of heart failure, renal impairment, or systemic illness," she said.
