“No, I haven't taken a test. Why the hell would I take a test?” said Biden during his virtual interview with CBS reporter Errol Barnett.
“Come on, man. That's like saying to you, ‘Before you got on this program, did you take a test where you’re taking cocaine or not?’ What do you think, huh? Are you a junkie?”
Biden, at 77, tried to turn the interview around on his opponent, the 74-year-old President Donald Trump, by referring to his own clinical examinations that doctors have given him to identify if he has early signs of dementia.
“Well if he can't figure out the difference between an elephant and a lion, I don't know what the hell he's talking about,” said Biden, referring to the test Trump took.
Biden also said that he believes the American public should be the judge of how physically and mentally fit he was.
https://twitter.com/errolbarnett/status/1290940305865400321
The statements made by Joe Biden about his refusal to get his cognitive abilities tested contradicts earlier statements he made back in June that suggested that he had already gotten his cognitive health checked.
During a press conference, one reporter – who was willing to share that, at 65, he can already feel his own mental acuity declining – asked if Biden had been tested to check if he has any degree of cognitive decline. To this, Biden responded: “I've been tested and I've been constantly tested.”
The former vice president further stated that he “can hardly wait” to compare his own cognitive capabilities with those of Trump, a reference to the fact that the two candidates will be squaring off in a presidential debate soon, with the first televised debate occurring on September 29.
Trump, for his part, stated in July that he has already taken a cognitive test and that he got a perfect score. This claim was confirmed by then-White House physician Ronny Jackson, as well as by Ziad Nasreddine, the doctor who created the test.
Jackson stated that Trump received a score of 30 out of 30 on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment exam back in 2018. Nasreddine backed up these claims in an interview by bragging that only 10 percent of “normal individuals” were able to get a score of 30 out of 30. Nasreddine further stated in a press release that the results of his test rule out any possibility of Trump experiencing any mild Alzheimer's or dementia.
Fox News host Sean Hannity reacted to Biden's latest interview by insisting that the former vice president needs to get his cognitive abilities evaluated.
“Biden loses his trend of thought often. He mixes up numbers often. He struggles to remember certain words,” said Hannity during his show. “At times, he doesn't even know what day of the week it is, what state he is in and what office he is even running for.”
Hannity also said that Biden is prone to being irritable, confused and angry, and always seems to be very exhausted whenever he appears for interviews, which to the news anchor signifies that “something is off, very off.” While he did not outright say it, Hannity may have been strongly suggesting that Biden has the early stages of dementia.
Given all of these, Hannity asserted that the American people “deserve an answer” and that Biden needs to take both a cognitive test and a comprehensive physical exam to make sure that he truly is healthy enough to run for president.
The Fox News host compared the questions Republicans and conservatives alike are sharing about Biden's health to the questions Democrats posed when it came to former president Ronald Reagan's health when he ran for a second term of office in 1984 at the age of 73, becoming the oldest person to be nominated for president before the upcoming election.
“Panic has set in among Democrats in the media mob,” said Hannity, claiming that the Democratic Party is avoiding questions concerning Biden's health “like the plague” and that they are “scared to death” for the truth about his cognitive decline to come out.
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