Given that Joe Biden has done an unusually good job of not sticking his foot in his mouth (most of the fucking time, anyway), Donald Trump has had precious few things that he can latch onto that give him a clear, easy nickname or fact that he can repeat over and over until it magically becomes everyone’s head canon. Trump is battling uphill with someone whom, to a lot of Americans, is pretty inoffensive. Biden’s biggest advantage at this point in the race is the fact that he’s been really boring and has been acting “presidential” while Trump stomps around proving that he’s a giant numbskull.
About the only thing Trump can bag on Biden for is being old, which is dumb, because in the immortal words of B-Rabbit, they’re almost the same age. This hasn’t stopped Trump from repeatedly suggesting Joe Biden is a sunsetting old fool, which is usually said after Papaya Pol Pot has unleashed a torrent of misinformation and half-remembered almost facts.
To prove that he has a big brain and is smarter than Biden, Trump has repeatedly said that he passed a cognitive test with “flying colors”. Trump being proud that he “aced” a cognitive test is kinda like your dog being proud that he managed not to eat its own shit, as it doesn’t really prove that you’re not a colossal idiot.
So what proves conclusively that Trump is a very stable, big brained genius who is way smarter than everyone else? From CBS News:
“If you’re in the office of the presidency, we have to be sharp,” Mr. Trump said, adding he asked then-White House doctor Ronny Jackson for the exam. “It was 30 or 35 questions. The first questions are very easy, the last questions are much more difficult.”
Mr. Trump explained the memory part of the test, and said his results impressed doctors.
“It’s like, you’ll go, ‘Person, woman, man, camera, TV’,” he said. “So, they’d say, ‘Could you repeat that?’ So, I said, yeah — person, woman, man, camera, TV.”
According to Mr. Trump, he had to recall the phrase again later during the test and was given “extra points” because he said it in order.
“They say, ‘Nobody gets it in order,'” he said, referring to the doctors. “It’s actually not that easy, but for me it was easy. And that’s not an easy question.”
So, to recap, the President of the Actual Literal United States is legitimately saying that he got extra points on a cognitive test most 6 year-olds could pass with flying color because he could remember a simple list of nouns and repeat them in order.
The President, who allegedly-but-probably-definitely paid someone to pass his SATs is saying that a cognitive test proves his intelligence, which isn’t how this works. Cognition (the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses) and intelligence (the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills). Basically, it’s the difference between your dog knowing that “sit” is a word, and your dog knowing what “sit” means and doing it accordingly.
This is yet another example of Trump setting himself up for a series of brutal self-owns because he lacks the actual intellect to realize what he’s doing. Again, Trump is only crowing about the cognitive test because he’s trying to make an argument that Joe Biden is mentally unfit for office. And if anyone but Trump was making that argument, it actually might not be a terrible one!
But instead of showcasing Joe’s mental unfitness, all he’s doing is proving what a laughably stupid man he is. Much like when Hillary lowered the bar for Trump, Trump is now setting Biden up to look great when he can do shit like “remember a list of things” without stumbling through it. And Trump is bringing unnecessary attention to the fact that he’s openly bragging that he passed a cognitive test that is typically only given to Alzheimer’s patients. He’s trying to make an argument that Joe Biden is an old sunsetting food while talking to Fox News about how he took a test that is typically given to sunsetting old fools. And just because Trump passed it doesn’t make him not a sunsetting old fool, it just means he’s slightly ahead of the smallest curve in the history of curves.
Trump’s new campaign approach is currently one in which the people around him are insisting that the only way for to win is for him to talk early, often, and without pause. This is bad advice, as is most advice anyone receives when they surround themselves with a group of simpering yes men who are unwilling to tell President Trump that he should really speak as little as possible at the moment. He can’t look any more absent about from the coronavirus pandemic than he already is (probably?), and by trying to be more “present”, all he’s doing is showing how utterly worthless he is.
In short, Trump’s ability to count backwards from 100 by 7 or remember 5 things is not proof of his competency. It’s merely proof that he’s sentient. Maybe he should stop crowing about how smart he is until he comes up with a way to prevent 1,000 people a day from dying from COVID-19.
What’s the big deal about saying “Purple Monkey Dishwasher”?
My mentally degraded father still has more intellect than Purple Monkey Dishwasher Sundowning Motherfucker ever had.
…saw this somewhere else & figured it probably ought to go here?
As a real life medical professional who is trained in administering these tests, the MOCA has a three word recall and it’s poor form to use words that are so closely related as “person man woman” or “camera TV.”
However a perfect score would suggest that Trump is not, in fact, suffering from dementia, though it would not rule out being an inflated pig’s anus who is unable to ever admit to being wrong or learn from mistakes.
as trevor noah said yesterday at the time of the interview trump just named things he saw in front of him. person (interviewer), woman (his press secretary), man (cameraman), tv (screen on camera). otherwise he couldn’t remember even those…
1:55
I would ALSO like to point out, that the self-own to somehow “prove” he isn’t a sunsetting, doddering, old fool is…. AMAZINGLY self-owning, timeline wise…
Trump keeps on saying these cognitive tests were RECENT.
Ronnie Jackson was done treating the president waaaaay back in 2018🤨😬🥴
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/29/politics/ronny-jackson-donald-trump-white-house-physician/index.html
He was the unqualified dude Trumpty-dumpty tapped to run the VA…
You know, the guy who was subsequently have been prescribing pills for randos around the WH & was found passed-out on the job, but mostly, he was someone with only small-time medical experience, who was tapped to run one of the largest health systems (the largest?) in the US
Ffs,this administration is SERIOUSLY like we somehow ended up with the WORST of Ronnie Ray-Gun’s second-term mental decline, with a heaping helping of Nixon, and all that staffed by the goddamn Kremlin, and some Nazis…
“The BEST people!!! The very BEST people!!!”
The best people…from the literal DREGS of the worst folks possible.
I remember back when he first took that test, and I looked at one printed online…
And for fuck’s sake, I’d be seriously embarrassed if a doctor asked me to take that test, and I really wouldn’t want to admit in public to taking it, regardless of how good my score was.
That’s clearly a test you give someone after they’ve had a head injury, or some disease that affects the brain.
And he’s still going on about it? for fuck’s sake…
what a present to biden’s ad team. this is as good as it gets…
Am looking for a commenter formerly known as Thegentildouche?
Forgive me if this is an intrusive way to search.
…not at all…would be delighted to hear form them ourselves as it happens
…if it would help at all they might possibly have signed in to a discord server called LeftofDead back when kinja was busy killing off Splinter & Deadspin (& I should think we could find or point you to a link for that) but sadly I don’t believe I’ve seen them hereabouts
…true of a longer list than we’d like…it was a good crowd & its absence is a sore spot for a bunch of us these days so I for one wish you luck with your search