Donald Trump Jr. on Tuesday echoed a call from his father that presidential candidates “take a full & complete Mental Competency Test” in order to run for office.
“He did this himself when he was president,” the eldest son of the ex-president wrote in sharing the message from Donald Trump’s Truth Social page.
But critics quickly pointed out that the ex-president didn’t take a “mental competency test,” or at least didn’t announce the results if he did.
Instead, he took something called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or MoCA, which is used to check for signs of cognitive impairments that could be an indication of dementia.
“It is supposed to be easy for someone who has no cognitive impairment,” Dr. Ziad Nasreddine, who invented the test, told MarketWatch in 2020.
It asks the subject to do things like to identify an elephant, or remember and then repeat five words ― which, in Trump’s case, were “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”
Trump boasted that his doctors were stunned by his ability to recall the words.
“They say, ‘That’s amazing. How did you do that?’ I do it because I have, like, a good memory,” he said in 2020. “Because I’m cognitively there.”
On Tuesday, Trump Jr. bragged about his father taking the test:
His critics fired back: