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Have any psychologists or academics tested Donald Trump's IQ?
Executive summary
Available reporting shows no verified, peer‑reviewed instance of a psychologist or academic publicly administering a formal IQ test to Donald Trump and publishing the results; Trump has repeatedly referred to having taken and aced brief clinical cognitive screens (e.g., the MoCA) during medical exams, which creators and experts say are not IQ tests [1] [2]. Claims that a high‑school IQ record showing a score of 73 was "discovered" have been debunked or treated as unverified by multiple fact‑checkers [3] [4] [5].
1. What reporting actually documents: cognitive screenings, not academic IQ tests
Contemporary news coverage describes Trump bragging about “perfect” or “very hard” results on short cognitive screens given at Walter Reed — widely reported as the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) or similar dementia‑screening tools — and his physician noting perfect scores; but experts including the MoCA’s creator say the instrument is designed to screen for cognitive impairment, not to measure intelligence quotient (IQ) [1] [2] [6].
2. No published academic IQ test of Trump in available sources
Major outlets and fact‑checkers in the provided set note that Trump has never publicly released formal IQ test results and that there is no verified academic study or psychologist’s report establishing a validated IQ score for him; the BBC explicitly states Mr. Trump “has never revealed his own IQ” [7], and other sources repeat the absence of any authoritative documented IQ result [8].
3. The “73” IQ story: origins and how it was treated by fact‑checkers
A widely circulated claim that an NYMA document showed Trump scored 73 on an IQ test has been investigated and described as unsupported or false by fact‑checkers: Full Fact cataloged the claim and its provenance [3], Snopes tracked versions of the same story and called it misleading or not substantiated [4], and PolitiFact similarly flagged the viral narrative about a military school employee finding test results as inaccurate [5]. Those pieces show the 73‑score allegation lacks authenticated primary evidence in current reporting [3] [4] [5].
4. Why the MoCA and similar screens get conflated with “IQ tests”
Trump and some coverage have used colloquial language calling a short clinical cognitive screen an “IQ test.” Reporting shows this conflation drives confusion: the MoCA’s author and dementia‑screening experts emphasize the test’s purpose is early detection of cognitive impairment, not quantifying general intelligence, and some outlets explicitly correct the mislabeling [6] [1] [2].
5. What academics and professional psychologists would require to publish an IQ assessment
Available reporting does not include any peer‑reviewed academic assessment of Trump’s IQ. To meet academic standards, a psychologist would normally administer a validated, standardized battery (e.g., WAIS variants), document methods, obtain subject consent or explain ethical considerations for public figures, and publish results with caveats about reliability and context — none of which appears in the supplied reporting [7] [8]. Therefore, no supplied source shows such a process occurred.
6. Competing perspectives and limitations in coverage
Some outlets and commentators have made speculative estimates of Trump’s intelligence or repeated unverified claims [8] [4], while mainstream fact‑checkers and medical experts in the supplied set push back on specific score claims and on labeling clinical screenings as IQ tests [3] [4] [1]. The limitation: the available documents focus on media reporting, fact checks, and brief clinical statements; they do not include private or unpublished psychological evaluations, so the possibility of undisclosed professional testing cannot be confirmed or disproven by these sources [3] [4] [8].
7. How to judge future claims responsibly
Treat claims of a public IQ score for any high‑profile figure as requiring primary documentation: a published test report, authentication of historical records, or a statement from a credentialed psychologist describing test type and norms. In the current reporting corpus, fact‑checkers have overturned the most dramatic archival claim (the “73” document) and experts have corrected the misuse of cognitive screens as IQ evidence [3] [4] [1] [2].
Conclusion: based on the provided sources, no psychologist or academic has produced and published a verified IQ test result for Donald Trump; what exists in reporting are brief clinical cognitive screenings that Trump and some outlets have colloquially called “IQ tests,” plus debunked/unsupported archival claims such as the NYMA “73” score [1] [2] [3] [4] [5].