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Trumps IQ
Executive summary
Public reporting shows no verified, public IQ score for Donald Trump; he has repeatedly boasted about having a “high” or “very high” IQ while his doctors and news outlets have emphasized that the cognitive screening he has cited—the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), on which he and his physicians say he scored 30/30—is a dementia screen, not an IQ test [1] [2]. Longstanding viral claims of a low score (e.g., “73” at New York Military Academy) have been debunked or found unsubstantiated in fact checks [3].
1. No official IQ on record — public figures vs. private testing
There is no credible public record of Trump taking a standardized IQ test whose results are verified and published; outlets that examine presidential intelligence note historians and psychologists often estimate “intellectual brilliance” indirectly because formal IQ scores for presidents are generally not available [4]. Fact-checkers and archive searches have found no credible contemporaneous reporting of a documented IQ score for Trump, and therefore statements assigning a precise IQ to him rest on speculation or secondary sources [3].
2. What Trump and White House doctors have said — MoCA, not IQ
Trump and his medical team have highlighted perfect scores on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) during physicals; White House physicians and coverage of his Walter Reed exam report a 30/30 result and Trump’s public boasts that he “had the highest mark” [1] [5]. Multiple outlets and the MoCA’s creator note the MoCA is designed to screen for cognitive impairment, not to measure intelligence or derive an IQ number, and there are “no studies showing that this test is correlated to IQ tests” [1] [2].
3. Why MoCA scores are often misrepresented in public debate
The MoCA is a 10-minute screening tool assessing memory, attention, language and visuospatial skills; its clinical purpose is to flag possible mild cognitive impairment rather than quantify innate intelligence [6]. Journalists and neurologists quoted in reporting explicitly caution against translating a perfect MoCA into an intelligence-quotient metric—yet political rhetoric has repeatedly conflated the two, with Trump using his MoCA result to argue he is mentally superior to rivals [1] [6].
4. Viral claims and debunks: the “73” story and other estimates
A persistent online claim that Trump once scored 73 on an IQ test at the New York Military Academy has been examined and found without credible documentary support; fact-checkers report no archival evidence for that number and note the story’s provenance traces to memes and anecdote rather than verifiable records [3]. Conversely, some websites and compilations offer high speculative estimates (e.g., “around 145”), but those are unverified and rely on conjecture or non-scholarly aggregation rather than documented testing [7].
5. Public perception and partisan views on “who is high- or low-IQ”
Polling shows perceptions of politicians’ intelligence are heavily partisan: surveys asking Americans to rate public figures’ IQs yield large divides, and Trump both habitually insults others as “low IQ” and claims high intelligence for himself—this shapes public belief more than any disclosed test score does [8]. Such perceptions reflect political alignment and rhetorical framing rather than objective measurement.
6. Limitations in available reporting and what we still do not know
Available sources do not provide a verified, peer-reviewed IQ test result for Trump; they do provide MoCA results and commentary that the MoCA should not be converted into an IQ [1] [2]. Available sources do not mention any confidential, verifiable IQ test released by a neutral testing authority; therefore claims assigning a precise IQ number are not supported by the cited reporting [3] [4].
7. What to watch for and how to interpret future claims
If a future report purports an official IQ score, readers should check whether it comes from an accredited psychometric test (e.g., WAIS) administered and reported with verifiable documentation; absent that, MoCA scores or public boasts remain clinically and statistically inappropriate proxies for IQ [1] [6]. Be alert to partisan motives: claims that highlight very high or very low scores often serve rhetorical or political aims rather than clinical accuracy [8] [7].