Click to enlarge image.

Donald Trump this week bragged about purportedly acing a widely used cognitive test that was administered to him when he was president, suggesting that the test included identifying drawings of three animals.

“I think it was 35, 30 questions,” the former president said in Portsmouth, N.H., of the test, which he said involved a few animal identification queries. “They always show you the first one, like a giraffe, a tiger, or this, or that — a whale. ‘Which one is the whale?’ Okay. And that goes on for three or four [questions] and then it gets harder and harder and harder.”

The only problem: The creator of the test in question, called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or MoCA, said it has never included the specific combination of animals described by Trump in any of its versions over the years.

Washngton Post: A ‘whale’ of a tale: Trump continues to distort cognitive test he took
The Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a test aimed at detecting dementia or cognitive decline, never included the combination of animals Trump identified this week

In my illustration there are all of the verisons of the MoCA I could find. There is a giraffe and a tiger but they aren’t on the same test. However…

Ziad Nasreddine, the Canadian neurologist who invented the test, said the assessment — intended primarily to test for signs of dementia or other cognitive decline — has never once included a drawing of a whale.

Washngton Post

I sent the top illustration to the Biden campaign via a tweet here. I added a drawing of a blue whale, the larest mammal know to ever have existed.

While the intelligence of dolphins has been the subject of numerous studies and they are considered to be very smart, whales in general are very intelligent too.

Maybe Trump in saying he identified a whale on the MoCA test is having whale envy.

My opinion is that of the three animals, used on the MoCA most shown in a web search, the lion, rhinoceros, and camel he is most like a rhinoceros (a rhino as opposed to a RINO) for the following reasons:

In a show of dominance, alpha male Indian rhinos can spray urine a distance of over 16 feet. This is typically done in the presence of other males or breeding-age females.

Male black rhinos are particularly aggressive in their pursuit of a mate, and the rate of “mortal combat” among these horned lovers is higher than any other mammal on the planet.

“Rhino farts also smell really bad, so much so that they have even given rise to a piece of brewing terminology; when the yeast used to make alcohol through fermentation produces hydrogen sulfide it gives off a horrible sulfur smell, known as a rhino fart.”

White rhino droppings are unique identifiers, meaning that a rhino can take one whiff of a dung heap and instantly know the animal’s age, sex, and reproductive status, according to one study

Mental Floss, 15 things about rhinos

Update: I just posted this on X here.

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