If Donald Trump won’t agree to take a televised cognitive test, Jimmy Kimmel decided someone should.
At the end of his monologue on Monday night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Kimmel aired a segment in which he took the same cognitive exam Trump has repeatedly said he has “aced.”
“This is the official exam administered by a medical professional,” Kimmel told viewers ahead of the taped segment, adding that he hadn’t seen the questions in advance and was “willing to release the full unedited version if necessary.” He framed the exercise as a response to Trump’s ongoing boasts, noting that he’d previously challenged the president to take the test on his show. “He still hasn’t gotten back to me on it,” Kimmel said.
The segment opened with Kimmel meeting Dr. Sarah Swanson, an internal medicine physician who regularly administers the exam. She explained that the test is typically given to patients 65 and older as part of an annual physical. Asked whether doing poorly would affect his credit score or require him to remove his shirt, Kimmel was reassured on both counts before the test began.
What followed was a mostly straight-faced run-through of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA): connecting numbers and letters in sequence, copying geometric designs, drawing a clock set to 11:10, identifying animals (“That’s a lion”; “That’s a camel—I just saw Zootopia”), memory recall, number repetition, letter-tapping, subtraction, sentence repetition, and word association.
During the verbal fluency portion—naming as many words as possible starting with the letter F—Kimmel quickly exceeded the target, rattling off entries like “fart,” “fish,” “flock,” “fan,” “funk,” and “frantic.” When he asked the doctor what words Trump might have come up with for the same exercise, she declined to speculate. Kimmel filled the silence himself: “Let’s see—finances, French fries, fat.”
After recalling all five memory words correctly—“church,” “velvet,” “face,” “red,” and “Daisy”—Dr. Swanson totaled the score and delivered the verdict: a perfect result.
“So I could be president,” Kimmel concluded.
While the piece was peppered with jokes, the premise itself wasn’t a parody. By hiring a doctor and airing the test, Kimmel gave viewers a clearer look at the exam at the center of the president’s boasts.
Watch Kimmel take the complete assessment at the top of this post.
been waiting for this from someone…