What did Donald Trump do today?

He had a challenging day on the cognitive fitness front.

This morning, Trump used a brief press availability to insult the intelligence of two of his political opponents, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX).

TRUMP: AOC—look. I think she's very nice. But she's very low IQ, and we really don't need low IQ. Between her and Crockett, we're gonna give them both an IQ test to see who comes out best. I took a real test at Walter Reed Medical Center and I aced it. Now it's time for them to take a test. 

The "real test" Trump took as part of his annual physical was the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). It is not an intelligence test, but it does test whether, for example, Trump was able to tell a lion from a camel, or say what bananas and oranges have in common. Since taking it five years ago, Trump has frequently boasted about "acing" it.

 

Ocasio-Cortez and Crockett are 35 and 44 years old, respectively—far too young for age-related cognitive decline to be a concern, so it is extremely unlikely that their routine medical assessments include the MoCA.

After bragging about having passed a cognitive impairment test in 2020, Trump then traveled to Pittsburgh, where he experienced a number of incidents in rapid succession suggesting cognitive impairment or other wellness issues. He dozed off while listening to a speech at the event he was attending. This happens a great deal with Trump—he's nodded off at funerals, diplomatic conferences, and most famously, his own criminal trial. 

He struggled to remember and then pronounce the name of Michael Kratsios, a White House aide currently serving as the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and who has worked with Trump since 2017. (Trump occasionally has difficulty speaking clearly, something his staff has variously blamed on a dry throat or technical recording glitches, when they admit it happened at all.) He introduced Rep. Dan Meuser (R-PA) to speak, who was not present or expect to be in attendence, and had to be corrected. 

Most bizarrely of all, Trump told a rambling story about his uncle, Dr. John Trump, who taught at MIT—although he wasn't, as his 79-year-old nephew claimed, the longest-serving professor in that school's history. Donald Trump's story involved Prof. Trump's student, Theodore Kaczynski, the mathematician better known as the Unabomber. According to Donald Trump, he asked his uncle what Kaczynski was like as a student:

TRUMP: I said, what kind of a student was he Uncle John, Dr. John Trump? Uh, he said: "What kind of a student — seriously, good ... he’d go around correcting everybody. But it didn't work out too well for him. Didn't work out too well, but it's interesting in life." 

But Trump was imagining all of it. Kaczynski never attended MIT, so could not have been John Trump's student. And John Trump died in 1985, before the identity of the bomber was known, so the conversation Donald Trump remembers could never have taken place. 

Why does this matter?

• Making up imaginary stories out of bits of other memories without realizing you are doing it is called confabulation, and it is a symptom of cognitive decline.