Friday, July 24, 2020

"Person, woman, man, camera, TV"

Donald Trump does not understand that a Montreal Cognitive Assessment is only ever administered to a patient when doctors have reason to suspect cognitive impairment for some reason, be it dementia, stroke or head trauma. He also fails to understand that the test is designed to be very easy for someone with normal brain function, and that any wrong answers count towards a confirmation of a problem and warrants further testing. Bragging about that he "aced the test" and did "amazingly well" is preposterous, as a perfect score is the norm for an entirely average person without brain damage.

Instructions for the person administering the test is also to provide positive feedback regardless of how the patient is actually performing ("good, this is going well"), and not to reveal the score to the subject ("you did great"). He obviously thinks the test was difficult, and he says that he doubts that his opponent Joe Biden would do well on the test. Given Trump's well known propensity for obvious projection, this tells us that he did not, in fact, do so well himself.

A telling sign that he does not even understand what the test is all about is his story about "one very tough question" where you are given five random words and are asked to repeat them. This is an extremely easy task, but the process of repeating them makes them enter the mid-term memory, which means that a normal person should be able to remember the words well enough to repeat them a few minutes later, after having answered some other easy questions. Donald Trump speaks of this as a Herculean feat requiring superhuman intelligence and focus, while in actuality it is a simple and straightforward thing to do for a person with a normal brain putting some effort and focus into the task.

Last, but not least, his mind failed to register that the words he were given were a deliberately unrelated mix, in order not to make the task trivial. One version of the test has the words "face, velvet, church, daisy, red". Donald Trump's addled and slow mind exemplified the question by naming strongly related and very concrete nouns he could spot in his surroundings: "person, woman, man, camera, TV". Still, even when he picked the words himself, he could repeat them five seconds later, but clearly stumbled and struggled with repeating them thirty seconds later.

Donald Trump was never intelligent, but now his mind is leaving him. He is not only stupid, evil and compromised by a number of serious psychological disorders rooted in his broken childhood and pampered life, he is now also suffering from dementia. A person in that condition absolutely cannot meet the requirements for serving as the President of the United States of America, and should be removed by invoking the procedures described in the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.