A viral post, backed with a newspaper clipping, claims that Donald Trump has an IQ of 73. Predictably, it’s receiving numerous responses ranging from comical to denial, but is it really true?
Donald Trump’s IQ score has been the topic of social media conversation since he first ran for President back in 2016. This is partly his own doing, as Trump has often bragged about his intelligence, but in 2019 a man claimed to have found an old newspaper article that disputes Donald’s claims.
Fact-checking resource site Snopes initially took on Donald Trump’s IQ in 2016, when claims of a suspiciously high score also floated around the internet. This high-IQ claim originated from a site called Before It’s News and suggested, based on theory and not any actual test scores, that Trump’s IQ is 156.
However, Snopes pointed out that the article “is chock-full of logical missteps and factual inaccuracies.” In short, Trump’s official school transcripts from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania are not available, and these documents are what the article apparently based its suggestions on — unavailable data.
A few years later, a story circulated about an IQ test that Donald Trump allegedly took during his first year at New York Military Academy. According to the story, Trump scored a very below average 73. Most explanations for IQ score ranges consider 73 to be “borderline impaired or delayed.”
The claim that Trump’s IQ is at that level is now growing in popularity once again, thanks in part to Trump being elected back into the Oval Office.
The rumor also became popular because it seemed to have been substantiated by a newspaper clipping. However, the clipping was deemed a fake, and one of the images was even later demonstrated to be a stock photo. Debunked even by Snopes, the claim fell flat, but the rumor continues to spread. Considering Trump has often called Joe Biden low IQ — an unfounded claim — people spare little sympathy when returning the insult back at Trump.
With newspaper articles now much easier to search thanks to extensive archival sites such as newspapers.com, we also could not find a single reference to this story nor anything that ever notes Trump’s actual IQ.
Since the claim that his IQ being 156 has been debunked, and the claim that his IQ is 73 has been debunked, then what is Donald Trump’s IQ?
Well, no one knows, because if Trump did take any IQ tests, then they haven’t been made public. Hence why rumors — whether favorable to him or not — will always be popular.
Trump could take an IQ test at any time if he so chooses. And with Trump’s obsession with bragging about his intelligence, it seems that he would want to show off his results. But that hasn’t happened, which likely means he has either never taken an IQ test, or he has taken one, but didn’t score high enough to brag about.