Trump’s greatest trick? Distracting us all from his incoherence

Donald Trump is a very stable genius – and he has the test results to prove it. In an extraordinary interview on Sunday with Chris Wallace on Fox News, Trump bragged about acing a cognitive exam he had taken, and said he could “guarantee” Joe Biden would not have scored so highly. This wasn’t the first time Trump has cited this test as proof of his mental acumen: in a Fox News interview earlier this month he claimed he had blown doctors away with his results. “Rarely does anyone do what you just did,” they supposedly told him.

While Trump hasn’t specified which test he is talking about, it is widely believed to be the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. This isn’t an IQ test – it’s used to detect mental impairment and dementia – with sample questions including drawing a clock and identifying pictures of animals. As Wallace noted, a lot of it is basic stuff: “They have a picture, and it says: ‘What’s that?’ and it’s an elephant.”

I’m not a doctor and it is not my place to speculate on the cognitive health of the US president. But while liberals relentlessly mock Trump’s boorishness and overinflated ego, I’m not sure we focus enough on the fact that much of what he says doesn’t make any sense at all. As Lenore Taylor pointed out last year, because reporters impose structure and sense on Trump’s disjointed rambling, we sometimes forget how unintelligible he is: “The process of reporting about this president can mask and normalise his full and alarming incoherence.”

It’s not just the process of reporting that has helped to normalise Trump. It is the criminally low standards that far too many reporters hold him to. When Trump finally wore a face mask earlier this month, for example, a White House reporter for the Washington Post described him as looking “presidential”. In 2017, Trump honoured the widow of a Navy Seal; this two-second break from being awful was enough to prompt Van Jones on CNN to announce that Trump “became president of the United States in that moment”. In March, when Trump managed to say something moderately sensible about the pandemic, CNN’s political correspondent described him as “the kind of leader that people need”.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that it’s impossible to properly scrutinise anything Trump says because there’s always another distraction. One minute he’s advocating injecting bleach to counter coronavirus, the next, his daughter-cum-adviser is advertising canned beans on Twitter. Normally, an ethics violation like that would be headline news, but it’s swiftly forgotten because (look!) Trump is on Fox News refusing to answer a question about whether he will accept the results of the November election. Which, again, would normally be a big story but, despite the fact it only happened on Sunday, has already been largely forgotten because, on Monday, the notoriously anti-mask president tweeted a bizarre photo of himself and declared mask-wearing patriotic. Now we’re all analysing that.

As for tomorrow? God knows what fresh hell that will bring. It’s almost as if Trump has forced us to live by his own warped logic; it is like we’re all staring at a picture of an elephant and are collectively keeping up the pretence that it’s a president.

• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist