A cabinet meeting Thursday turned into an extended public debate over basic medical terminology after President Donald Trump repeated a claim that his brain screenings involved “very tough mathematical equations and things.”
Trump told the room he is the only president in history to have taken a cognitive test, and that he completed it three times, each time getting every answer right.
“I aced it all three times in front of numerous doctors that I have no idea who they are,” Trump said.
He said the test starts easy and escalates sharply by the finish, adding that one physician watching told him: “I’ve never seen anybody get them all right. I’ve been doing the test for twenty years.”
Trump: "I'm the only president that ever took a cognitive test. I took it 3 times. It's actually a very hard test for a lot of people. It wasn't hard for me. It starts off with an easy question and by the time you get to the middle it gets tougher — mathematical equations and… pic.twitter.com/4FFivCvytA
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 26, 2026
The test Trump referenced is the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or MoCA, a roughly ten-minute clinical screening tool designed to detect mild cognitive impairment, not to measure aptitude or IQ.
People with no cognitive impairment routinely pass it without difficulty.
Its math component is a serial subtraction exercise: the test-taker subtracts seven from 100, then continues subtracting seven from each result.
The test also asks patients to name drawn animals, copy a geometric figure, recall a short word list, and state the date and their location.
Trump has discussed the test many times over the years and has consistently treated it as an intelligence benchmark.
The claim about complex mathematical equations is new and does not correspond to any published version of the MoCA, several of which are publicly available.
Viral footage of Thursday’s remarks quickly attracted a community note on the platform formerly known as Twitter, clarifying that the MoCA is a short screening tool that ordinary adults complete without trouble and that its math tasks are basic, not complex.
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok also weighed in, describing the MoCA as a quick clinical screening instrument for older adults that begins with straightforward tasks like animal identification and clock drawing before moving to attention and memory items including the serial sevens subtraction exercise.
