
A psychologist is speaking out about what it means that the president keeps taking cognitive tests, explaining that Donald Trump’s doctors are likely past the point of trying to figure out whether he is suffering from dementia and are now just monitoring his decline.
Former Johns Hopkins University Medical School professor of psychology, Dr. John Gartner, spoke with The Daily Beast about the three Montreal Cognitive Assessments (MoCA) Trump has undergone this year and said they could be a sign of just how quickly Trump’s cognitive state is deteriorating.
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“You know, he kind of gave the game away, as he often does,” Gartner said, referring to Trump bragging about taking the test repeatedly.
“You could maybe justify giving someone the MoCA once, just on their age, just as part of a physical. If you’re giving it to him three times, that means you’re not assessing dementia. That means you’re monitoring dementia.”
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Gartner also brought up the MRI Trump recently underwent in October. Trump claimed that he didn’t even know what body part the MRI scanned – a bizarre claim considering how long MRIs take, how noisy they are, how obvious it is which body part is getting scanned, and how doctors don’t order such tests without explaining their reasoning to patients.
“Because if you keep feeling like, no, he’s still got the symptoms, we’ve got to see how bad he’s doing now, we’ve got to check again, see how bad he’s doing now… I think they’re giving him cognitive tests and MRIs every six months to monitor the progress of his dementia, and/or strokes,” Gartner said.
“We have to judge people against their own baseline, and if somebody doubles their rate of speed, that’s a mental status change of some kind,” he continued.
Trump bragged about the cognitive tests as recently as this past Friday during a rally in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where he stressed that his most recent cognitive test was “not easy.”
“Nobody on that stand could answer, probably, and I got ’em, I aced ’em,” he added, pointing to a section of the audience.
“The first question is like, ‘What is this?’ And they show a lion, a giraffe, a fish, and a hippopotamus. And they say, ‘Which is the giraffe?'” he recounted. “It then gets harder!”
Trump: I took cognitive tests. By the way, not easy. The first question is like what is this and they show a lion, giraffe, fish and a hippopotamus. And they say which is the giraffe. pic.twitter.com/IQhU9pdnMj
— Acyn (@Acyn) December 20, 2025
The White House later claimed that Trump’s October MRI was to monitor his heart and abdomen and was “preventative” in nature. The White House denies that there is anything wrong with Trump’s health.
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