Doctor raises prospect of 'underlying condition' as Trump faces non-routine cognitive test
A physician who appeared on MS NOW Sunday morning pushed back on Donald Trump's early morning boast about acing a cognitive screening test, warning that the frequency with which Trump appears to be taking the exam raises questions rather than answering them — because the test is typically administered when doctors are already concerned about something.
Dr. Vin Gupta was responding to Trump's 12:35 a.m. Truth Social post in which the president claimed to have scored a perfect 30 out of 30 on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, calling it an "approved high difficulty cognitive test" that no other president has taken and describing the result as evidence of "extreme intelligence."
Gupta was not impressed. "This is a screening tool, at a very high level, for early signs of cognitive decline or dementia," he said. "It is not something that assesses the ability to do the world's hardest job under pressure — executive functioning. It is not that tool. It's not a neuropsychiatric test."
He also questioned Trump's characterization of the exam as difficult. "I don't think a lot of people find it to be terribly difficult, as he describes it."
But Gupta's sharpest point came when the anchor asked who typically initiates the test — the patient or the doctor.
"Traditionally, it is the latter," Gupta said. "It's something that if we're getting it frequently, say every four to six weeks, like it seems like they're doing, that is something that is used to surveil an underlying condition in typical scenarios. In this case, this is not a test you routinely would otherwise do with this type of frequency."
Gupta also raised broader concerns about transparency surrounding Trump's physical, which was released late on a Friday night and included what he called "overly editorialized language" — including references to an AI tool assessing Trump's cardiac age and an explanation attributing bruising on both of Trump's hands to handshaking. "This is not professional medical language that you use to describe somebody's physical condition," he said.
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