What To Know
- The View cohosts criticized Donald Trump for conflating a dementia screening test with an IQ test.
- Joy Behar expressed deep concern about Trump having access to nuclear codes, stating that his cognitive abilities keep her up at night.
- Sara Haines emphasized that the cognitive test Trump took does not measure IQ.
The Wednesday, October 29, episode of The View featured the panel discussing Donald Trump‘s confusion of a dementia assessment for an IQ test. “They say toddlers have passed this with a perfect score, so I don’t know if he should brag,” Sunny Hostin said after the Montreal Cognitive Assessment was shown onscreen.
Sara Haines also pointed out that “the scientist who designed this said it’s in no way indication of IQ because it’s a cognitive abilities test.”
All jokes aside, the whole situation was upsetting for Joy Behar, who said, “The scary part is that this person who can tell you the difference between a camel and an elephant has the nuclear codes. That is what frightens me and what keeps me up at night and why I woke up this morning at 4 o’clock. He cannot pass, really, a cognitive test.”
Behar also called out Jake Tapper for writing “an entire book about [Joe] Biden’s cognitive abilities,” but he hasn’t written nothing about this situation.
Trump talked about his assessment while speaking to reporters recently. He challenged Jasmine Crockett and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to take the same test as him. “[The Democrats] 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,” Trump said. “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. 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 fix or six, and when you get up to 10 and 20 and 26, they couldn’t come close to answering those questions.”
The president received a perfect score on the 10-minute test, which is used to identify signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s, but is not an indicator of IQ, as Trump claimed. As Haines pointed out, Dr. Ziad Nasreddine, who created the test, previously noted, “There are no studies showing that this test is correlated to IQ tests. 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.”
Alyssa Farah Griffin pointed out that “Donald Trump is someone I don’t agree with a lot, I think he does a lot of things wrong, has poor moral character,” but said she’s “not convinced he’s fading mentally” and said Democrats should “focus on the issues” instead of mental state. “He’s giving you an array to attack,” she added, to which Hostin replied, “Like his lack of cognition!”
The View, Weekdays, 11a/10c, ABC