Trump Made Bizarre Request At Hospital After Assassination Attempt: Book
The Washington Post published an excerpt from '2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America' detailing the day of the assassination attempt on him in Butler, Pennsylvania.
A portion of it contained the curious item of Trump making his scan request to the physician and walking down the hall with a phalanx of Secret Service agents to get the scan.
Here's the rest of the passage:
He asked to see the 'film' from the scan. The doctor said that wasn't done anymore, and offered him a written report.
'I want the film,' he repeated.
[Co-campaign manager Susie Wiles] left to get a copy of the image, and while she was gone, one of the aides asked him why.
'It's like an IQ test,' Trump said. 'They tell you that your brain is good, so I just want to have that.'
Wiles put the images in a manila envelope in her bag.
Brain CT scans are used to detect tumors, bleeding, or other abnormalities, but they do not measure intelligence, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine. However, another type of scan, the MRI, is thought to indicate intellectual capacity as brain activity is tracked at rest, Caltech reported. A study showed that infants' IQ could potentially be predicted using the MRI.
Trump has been known to obsess over IQ, and the timing of his request might have had to do with his race against then Democratic nominee Joe Biden. While Biden bore the brunt of concerns over cognitive ability at the time, Trump also faced questions.
Biden withdrew from the race about a week later and was replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump, of course, won the election but has not quelled accusations of impairment.
HuffPost has reached out to Trump's team for comment.
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