Trump says he aced a cognitive test during physical exam

By Kate Sullivan and Josh Wingrove

President Donald Trump said he underwent and passed a cognitive exam during a roughly four-hour physical exam conducted on Friday by his physician.

“I took a cognitive test and I don’t know what to tell you other than I got every answer right,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Florida.

Trump, in response to a question, said it was the same cognitive screening he had taken in the past — a test which involved him repeating certain words to demonstrate his memory — and said he had taken it because he “wanted to be a little different than Biden.”

Last year’s campaign highlighted questions about presidential fitness and health transparency; culminating in President Joe Biden’s decision to exit the race amid questions about his mental acuity and whether his staff sought to hide his condition from the public.

“It’s a pretty well known test. Whatever it is, I got every one — I got it all right,” Trump said, indicating that he had taken it four times before.

The president said that overall he believed the annual checkup, which was conducted by Navy Captain Sean Barbabella, his personal doctor went “well” and that he received some suggestions from the medical staff on his health. The president said that the results would be released in a report on Sunday.

“Overall, I felt I was in very good shape. A good heart, a good soul, a very good soul,” Trump said.

The Friday physical conducted at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland was the first for Trump, 78, since he began his second term. He is the oldest person ever to be inaugurated as the American president.

He has long been reluctant to share details about his well-being, making his annual exams — typically standard practice for presidents — anything but routine. During his first run for office, Trump released a note from a doctor that claimed he would be the “healthiest individual ever elected” to the White House — a determination the physician later said the candidate had dictated to him.

During his last term, Trump waited more than a year after his inauguration for his first checkup. In 2020, the then-White House physician, Sean Conley, released a report on the president’s health that used “summarized data” over a six-month period with no explanation from the White House over why the physical took half-a-year to complete.

In 2020, Trump said he had undergone a cognitive test a year earlier and in an interview hailed his own performance by proclaiming “person, woman, man, camera, TV,” to explain how he repeated certain words to demonstrate his memory. The moment went viral.