Donald Trump threw another fit on his social media website on Sunday, this time challenging a host of rivals to a “mental acuity test.”
Trump, who is refusing to debate any of his Republican presidential rivals but instead offered to debate Meghan Markle, is demanding that US President Joe Biden, right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch and others take a test of his choosing, at a place of his choosing.
“It will be a tough one,” the former president wrote on Truth Social. “Nobody will come even close to me!”
Trump was triggered by a Wall Street Journal poll in which 49% said he was not mentally up for the job of president. (That number was 60% for Biden.)
“A few years ago I was the only one to agree to a mental acuity test, & ACED IT,” Trump wrote in response to the poll, which he claimed was “probably rigged.”
Trump hasn’t taken a “mental acuity test,” or at least hasn’t publicly revealed the results of such a test if he did. However, in 2020 he took the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or MoCA, which is used to check for signs of cognitive impairments that could be an indication of dementia.
Trump has often bragged of passing the assessment, and insisted that it was hard.
But it’s not supposed to be.
“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 complete tasks like identifying an elephant, or remembering and then repeating five words ― which, in Trump’s case, were infamously “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”
Now, however, he seems to think passing the MoCA means he can challenge Biden, Murdoch, Murdoch’s sons, and the heads of the Wall Street Journal to the test of his choosing.
Neither Biden nor Murdoch have responded to Trump’s “challenge,” but the former president’s critics had plenty to say: