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Fact check: Are there independent medical records or third-party confirmations of Trump's cognitive test scores?
Executive Summary
President Donald Trump’s reported perfect 30/30 score on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) was disclosed by White House physician Dr. Ronny Jackson in 2018, but no independent release of underlying medical records or third‑party verification of those raw test materials has been published. Academic and media analyses that discussed the event focused on the MoCA’s dissemination and interpretation rather than providing separate medical documentation or verification, and later academic attempts to assess leaders’ mental functioning used different instruments and expert panels rather than the original clinical records [1] [2] [3] [4]. This review extracts the core claims, synthesizes the available analyses, and highlights what is and is not available in the public record about cognitive test documentation and independent confirmation.
1. Why supporters point to a clean cognitive report — and what that claim actually rests on
The principal public claim that President Trump had no cognitive impairment rests on a statement by White House physician Dr. Ronny Jackson, who reported that Trump “scored 30/30” on the MoCA and was “cognitively sound,” a finding that has been cited repeatedly as direct evidence of intact cognition [1]. The MoCA is a recognized screening tool that evaluates multiple cognitive domains, and a 30/30 score is the maximum attainable, which supporters present as dispositive. However, the public evidence for that claim is an official disclosure of the score and summary physician statement rather than publication of the completed test pages, administration notes, or contemporaneous third‑party clinical evaluations that would allow independent verification or re‑scoring by outside clinicians [1] [5]. The available documentation thus consists of a physician’s public report, not raw medical records.
2. Academic and clinical literature focused on the MoCA’s use — not on releasing clinical files
Academic commentary and clinical literature that sprang up following the publicized evaluation emphasized the broader impact on MoCA use and interpretation, including spikes in public interest and debates about cutoff scores and false positives, but did not produce or cite independent release of Trump’s clinical files [3] [5]. Peer‑reviewed pieces examined how media coverage changed awareness of the MoCA and how cutoff thresholds might overestimate impairment in some populations, which underscores that a single score has contextual sensitivity [3] [5]. Those analyses therefore add context about the test’s limitations and population norms, but they do not substitute for third‑party confirmation or an independent audit of the specific administration in question [2] [3].
3. Independent expert assessments used different tools and were not based on the original MoCA records
Subsequent studies that assessed political leaders’ mental functioning employed other instruments and methodologies, such as the Psychodiagnostic Chart (PDC‑2) administered by panels of experts, and reported strikingly different results for Trump and other leaders; these efforts did not rely on or reproduce the original MoCA test materials and therefore are not independent confirmations of that specific score [4] [6]. One 2024 study using the PDC‑2 reported scores for several leaders that placed them in ranges characterized by severe mental illness, but the study was an expert‑rated psychodiagnostic assessment rather than a re‑examination of clinical neurocognitive test documents [4]. That methodological distinction matters because cross‑study comparisons of scores across different instruments do not validate or invalidate a prior MoCA administration without access to the original testing data [6].
4. What is missing from the public record — and why that matters for verification
The public record lacks the raw MoCA answer sheets, administration timings, examiner notes, or contemporaneous secondary clinical assessments that would allow independent clinicians or researchers to corroborate the reported 30/30 result. Media reporting and academic commentaries repeatedly document the absence of independently released medical records pertaining to that cognitive evaluation, and an unavailable source in the corpus further illustrates gaps in accessing potentially relevant material [2] [3] [7]. Without those primary documents, assertions based on the physician’s statement remain unilateral disclosures; external re‑scoring, examination of possible administration conditions, or evaluation of test suitability relative to norms cannot be performed, leaving verification dependent on the original reporting party [2] [7].
5. Final synthesis: confirmed public claim, unconfirmed documentation, and implications
The confirmed public facts are that Dr. Ronny Jackson reported a MoCA score of 30/30 in January 2018 and that multiple academic articles and studies discussed the MoCA’s role, cutoff debates, and independent psychodiagnostic evaluations of leaders using other tools [1] [3] [5] [4]. The absence of independently released clinical test materials or third‑party re‑evaluations means there is no publicly available medical record or external audit that independently confirms the MoCA score beyond the physician’s statement [2] [7]. Stakeholders should therefore treat the publicized score as an official clinical disclosure rather than a verifiable dataset until raw records or independent clinical confirmations are made public.