President Trump’s interview with Christopher Wallace wasn’t as positive for the President as many of his supporters would desire. In particular, Chris Wallace casting shade on the difficulty of the President’s cognitive ability test has elicited a negative response.
In the interest of fairness, we at TNB have engaged in some hard-hitting investigative journalism to determine if in fact the President’s cognitive test was more difficult than his enemies have portrayed. While we recognize the inevitable criticism regarding “dumpster diving” to retrieve the original records, we wish to remind all complainants that the administration has often been described on the whole as a dumpster and in this case we at least avoided waiting until it was on fire.
Taking the President’s explanation at face value, we expected some incredibly difficult questions on the test… “What is the nuclear triad?”, “How do you spell ‘choker'” or “Should you stare into the sun?” Instead what we found was that the President had aced a fairly simple cognitive test with flying colors…
…on the seventy-third attempt.
From the sheaf of discarded “practice runs”, we now present you with some of the President’s original answers to his cognitive exam:
- The Visuospatial / Executive exam: a series of circles starting at 1, then moving to A, then moving to 2, and moving to B, trace a path to “E”. On no less than five occasions Trump kept returning to 1, insisting that he was #1 and that’s the only thing that mattered. It appears that his aides finally managed to convince him that it was a test, because subsequent efforts only occasionally veered off from the proper pattern.
- Visuospatial / Executive exam part 2: Copy cube. Starting on test #7, an aide or doctor has added “Freehand. Do not take to copy machine” underneath the image.
- Draw Clock (ten past eleven): The President has drawn a small mushroom and a rough sketch of a $10 bill on the seventh test. He makes the same mistake in tests #22, 27, 38, 42, 49, 55, 59, 63 and 71. (NOTE: It has come to our attention that the mushroom may in fact be intended as an abnormally squat male member, and that the President may have been unable to distinguish the “l” in clock or recall being informed about the correction.) The arrangement of the hands on the clock seem to be completely random.
- Naming: Images are presented of a lion, a rhinoceros, and a camel. On test 8, President Trump has written “John Barron”, “Mitt Romney”, and “Ivanka, because I want to hump her” with a small smiley face beside it.
- Memory: Read list of words (face, velvet, church, daisy, red) subject must repeat them. Do two trials, even if first trial is successful. Do a recall after five minutes. Based on the point tallies, it appears that in at least seventeen tests, this was failed. While President Trump always spoke up for his Reds, he consistently failed to grasp Church.
- Attention: This spot just had doodles of crying physicians on test 10, presumably from the doctors administering the exam.
- Language: While President Trump did not seem to have any trouble repeating things he was told to say, he had difficulty on the “Fluency” portion of the test, where he was asked to name as many words as he could which began with the letter “F” in one minute. On at least two occasions it seems the only word he could think of was “Fuck”, and on one other he fixated on the word “phone”, insisting it should count.
- Abstraction: The President was asked to provide the groupings associated with “Train and Bicycle” and “Watch and Ruler”. Mentioning the word “Ruler” apparently sent him into a fit of giggling which in turn caused him to fall over.
The President did eventually pass the test, as mentioned above. He was reportedly so pleased that he promised any of his lingering cognition would be killed off by the summer heat, and that one day very soon it would just disappear.
