President Donald Trump boasted that he had scored a perfect 30 out of 30 on his latest cognitive screening, claiming the result demonstrated “extreme intelligence” and calling for every presidential and vice-presidential candidate to be required to take what he described as a “high difficulty” exam.
The score, drawn from Trump’s annual physical at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, was disclosed in a condensed memo released by White House physician Dr. Sean Barbabella, who described the president’s cognitive function as within normal limits and concluded that Trump remains in excellent health. Trump, who will turn 80 in June, used a late-night post to Truth Social to broadcast and reinterpret the finding.
“Unlike other U.S. Presidents, none of whom have ever taken an approved, high difficulty, Cognitive Test, I scored a perfect 30 out of 30, considered ‘extreme intelligence,’” Trump wrote. “Are the Dumocrats really surprised? In fact, this is my fourth such test, all PERFECT or, 120 correct answers out of 120 questions asked! It is very rare that anyone gets a Perfect Score, especially when achieved four times in a row. All people running for President and Vice President should be forced to take high difficulty Cognitive Tests. Congress, and the Dumocrats, should demand it!”
The exam Trump took was the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, known by the acronym MoCA, a 10-minute, 30-point screening tool developed by Canadian neurologist Dr. Ziad Nasreddine in 1996 to detect mild cognitive impairment and early dementia. The test asks patients to draw a clock and a cube, repeat short word lists from memory, name animals from drawings, recall a series of numbers in reverse, and complete other brief tasks across attention, language and visuospatial domains. A score of 26 or higher is considered normal cognitive function.
Medical specialists pushed back on the framing the president used to package the result. Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a cardiologist and CNN medical analyst, posted on X that the screening is not an intelligence test and that Trump’s score does not reflect what the president claims it does.
“It’s a dementia screening tool, not an IQ test,” Reiner wrote, noting that any score of 26 or above qualifies as normal cognition and that none of the items on the exam can fairly be described as high difficulty. In a separate post, Reiner questioned why Trump had been given the screening a fourth time at all, pointing out that he had already taken three in recent years.
Trump first sat for the MoCA in January 2018, when then-White House physician Dr. Ronny Jackson administered it at the president’s request following questions about his mental fitness. Trump scored a perfect 30 at the time and has invoked the result repeatedly in the years since, including as a campaign-trail line of attack against former President Joe Biden over Biden’s age and acuity. Trump took the test again in April 2025, with public references to a further administration in October 2025, and now once more in May 2026, according to records of his physical exam history.
The framing Trump used in Saturday’s post diverges in key respects from the official White House documentation. The Barbabella memo characterizes the cognitive function finding as within normal limits, the standard MoCA descriptor, rather than as a marker of exceptional intelligence. Nasreddine, the test’s developer, has repeatedly stressed in interviews that the screening is a clinical tool for detecting decline and is not intended to measure general cognitive ability or rank healthy adults against one another.
The renewed focus on Trump’s cognitive testing arrives as questions about presidential health and acuity remain politically salient on both sides of the aisle. Trump, the oldest person ever inaugurated to the office, has made his MoCA performance a recurring talking point since the first administration, alongside boasts about his physical stamina and weight. The most recent physical listed the president at 6 feet 3 inches and 238 pounds.
(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)