After Donald Trump inexplicably bragged this week that he could beat Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) in a battle of IQ tests, “The View” co-host Joy Behar called on one prominent journalist to talk more about the president’s supposed cognitive decline: Jake Tapper.
The CNN host of “The Lead” memorably published “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” this summer, a deep dissection of how Capitol power players and D.C. media failed to properly report on President Joe Biden’s mental and physical capabilities as a leader.
Now that Trump has exhibited instances that Behar believes show a similar decline, she’s calling out the journalist for again failing to talk about it.
“I would like to know why Jake Tapper, who wrote an entire book about Biden’s cognitive abilities, says nothing and writes nothing about this guy,” Behar said on Tuesday’s “The View.”
The conversation arose during the ABC talk show’s popular “Hot Topics” segment, as moderator Whoopi Goldberg ran through a recent cognitive test the president took while at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Trump mistook it for an IQ test rather than a cognitive assessment, and he’s since challenged the “low-IQ person” Crockett and Ocasio-Cortez to get a perfect score like he did.
The panel then pulled up a sample of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MOCA) that Trump likely took, which involved naming pictures of an elephant and alligator, drawing a cube, connecting numbers and letters and drawing a clock.
“They say toddlers have passed this with a perfect score, so I don’t think it’s something he should brag about,” co-host Sunny Hostin said Tuesday.
Co-host Sara Haines chimed in: “The scientist who designed it said this is no ways indication of IQ because it’s a cognitive abilities test — so it kinda tells you his cognitive abilities that he screwed that up.”
“The tragedy of this, and the scary part is that this person who can tell you the difference between a camel and an elephant, has the nuclear codes,” Behar said. “That is what frightens me and keeps me up at night and why I woke up this morning at 4 o’clock because I’m worried about the fact that he cannot pass, really, a cognitive test.”
Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump aide-turned-critic, disagreed that her colleagues would zero in on Trump’s apparent cognitive decline rather than his policies.
“I do want to say as one of the one in three Americans who didn’t want Donald Trump or Joe Biden because I had concerns about their ability to do the job for another four years, I don’t think that we should be using that as an example,” she said of the assessment. “I think that Donald Trump is somebody I don’t agree with a lot, I think he gets a lot of things wrong, I think he has poor moral character. I’m not convinced he’s fading mentally.
“I think he is a man who is invested in longevity,” she continued. “I think that Democrats should focus on beating him on substance, not on ‘he’s crazy, he’s losing it.’”
Griffin added that those who didn’t criticize Biden’s decline aren’t in a position to turn around and criticize Trump’s.
“I think you’re kind of missing it,” she said. “Just focus on the issues. He’s giving you an array of things to attack.”
Watch the full segment of “The View” discussing Trump’s cognitive assessment in the video above.
