Trump brags about knowing his animals in New Hampshire

Donald Trump has a special talent for wooing crowds while out on the campaign trail but it usually isn’t his policies that snatch headlines. Sometimes Trump says the wrong thing and it becomes an issue but other times he just says something silly. 

The former president has taken a lot of heat from his political opponents in the past for a mispronounced name here or forgotten word there, but nothing lights up those who hate Trump as much as when one of his brags makes him look like a fool. 

Trump has suffered from many hilarious self-inflicted roasts during his almost decade in the political spotlight but few have been as funny as what happened in New Hampshire on January 17th when he bragged about taking a test for dementia. 

The former president began his weird rant in his Trumpian fashion, gesturing his hands and telling the crowd that he was good at tests and that he needed to take his dementia test because he had to “shut it up” presumably referring to his critics. 

“I took it, and I aced it,” Trump told a crowd of his supporters before elaborating. “I think it was 35… 30 questions. And let me tell you, you know, they always show you the first one: a giraffe, a tiger or a whale. ‘Which one is the whale?'” 

It might not seem like much but the way in which Trump explained how he aced his test and the reaction of the crowd made the entire situation into one of the most ridiculous in Trump’s long history of self-created asinine public situations.  

Trump went on to give his brag a little context and make the point that Joe Biden would not have done as well as he had according to Rolling Stone’s Charisma Madrang, who explained it was a tactic Trump learned to exploit while in office. 

Back in 2020, Trump bragged about the results of an assessment he underwent while in office that was designed to test for mild cognitive impairments such as the symptoms of early-onset dementia. It was a test he passed according to Trump. 

“The first questions are very easy, the last questions are much more difficult,” the former president explained during one interview at the time according to The Hill. “It’s actually not that easy. But for me it was easy,” Trump continued. 

The former president made the same point in 2020 that he did on January 17th in New Hampshire—namely, that Joe Biden should have to take a similar test and he asserted that Biden was suffering from cognitive decline. 

“Joe should take that test because something is going on, and I say this with respect,” Trump said according to Politico, adding it was “going to probably happen to all of us, right? You know, it’s going to happen. But we can’t take a chance of it happening.”

The former president’s brag in New Hampshire about passing his most recent cognitive test wasn’t the first time Trump mentioned the incident in public. In December 2023, the former president mentioned it while campaigning in Iowa. 

“I took a physical and I passed with flying colors,” Trump explained to the crowd “And I took a cognitive exam. I said ‘Doctor, give me anything you want, I want to take it.’” He took the cognitive test too and according to his account he aced it. 

Trump’s preoccupation with his ability to pass a cognitive test might seem silly to some but the constant reminders of his cognitive abilities, and his comparisons to those of Biden, are a clever political tactic that could pay dividends in the coming election . 

In November 2023, Biden turned 81 years old and the rhetoric surrounding his birthday only shined a light on what many in the United States believe is a real problem for Biden, his age, as his reelection efforts moved into full swing. 

In September 2023, polling data from Reuters and Ipsos showed that 77% of Americans thought Biden was too old to be president, an astonishing number when paired with the finding that 65% of Democrats believed he was too old. 

Only 39% of those polled thought Biden was mentally sharp enough to be the president while 59% said that Trump was too old to be president. Interestingly, 54% of respondents reported that they thought Trump was mentally sharp enough to be the president.