Though Trump and his team have labored to raise questions about Biden’s fitness for office, in recent weeks those attacks have boomeranged on Trump. After he struggled with a glass of water — using two hands to lift it to his mouth — and walked haltingly down a ramp at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where delivered the commencement address in June, Trump’s own fitness became part of the cable news narrative.
The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, launched a 45-second ad echoing those themes. “The most powerful office in the world needs more than a weak, unfit, shaky president,” the ad’s narrator intones.
Recent surveys show that voters believe Biden’s mental acuity either matches or exceeds Trump’s. In a Fox News poll released Sunday, registered voters said by an eight-point margin that Biden has the mental soundness to serve effectively as president, while voters doubted Trump’s mental soundness by eight points.
And a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted at the end of May found that 46 percent of voters thought Trump had the “mental sharpness” necessary to serve effectively as president, compared with 49 percent who thought Biden did.
T.J. Ducklo, a Biden campaign spokesman, dismissed Trump’s challenge, saying, “The only testing Donald Trump should be focused on is the kind we need to get the covid-19 crisis under control.”
“The thousands of Americans who are contracting this virus each day don’t care whether or not the president can identify a photo of an elephant — they care their federal government is doing everything possible to keep them safe and right now, under this president, that is not happening,” Ducklo said in a statement.
But a sitting president bragging about his test results for cognitive impairment, and taunting his political opponent to take a similar exam, is unprecedented, Engel said.
“Among presidential historians, we all trained in graduate school to never to use the word ‘unprecedented’ because we’re told that there’s always a precedent,” Engel said. “But the truth is Trump does any number of things every week that are unprecedented, including the boasting of things that have no basis in fact. This boast that a cognitive test somehow is a sign of his intelligence? You can chalk this up as one of them.”
He added that Trump’s entire obsession with the MoCA is “incredibly bizarre.”
“This is a basic cognition test that any reasonable adult should be able to pass,” Engel said. “I don’t understand why he’s bragging about it, but there are many things this president does that are hard to understand.”
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