Fact check: Has any US president publicly disclosed their IQ score?

1. Why the headline claim collapses: presidents have not released verified IQs

Contemporary fact-checking and historical reviews concur that no U.S. president has released a verified, official IQ score into the public record; attempts to present such scores trace to secondary estimations, hoaxes, or mislabeling of other cognitive tests as IQ measures. Investigations into viral claims — including the widely circulated fabricated list of presidential IQs and the debunked image claiming Donald Trump scored 73 — show the underlying items were fabricated or miscaptioned, rather than derived from formal, documented IQ assessments administered and published by the presidents themselves ^{[3] [2]}. This pattern means headlines that assert a president “has an IQ of X” are based on estimates or misinformation, not first‑person disclosure.

2. The Trump episode clarifies confusion between screening tests and IQ tests

Recent reporting from October 28, 2025, documented that Donald Trump publicly boasted about his performance on a dementia screening and mistakenly referred to it as an “IQ test,” prompting the screening’s creator, Dr. Ziad Nasreddine, to state the tool was not designed to measure intelligence ^[1]. Independent reporting and prior fact-checks reiterate that Trump has never released an official IQ score, and viral artifacts claiming a numerical IQ for him — such as the 73 image circulating in 2019 — were proven to be falsified ^{[2] [4]}. The episode illustrates how misunderstanding or mislabeling different cognitive measures fuels public belief that a formal IQ disclosure exists when it does not.

3. Why published “rankings” and estimates are unreliable but common

Multiple outlets compile lists ranking presidents by estimated IQs, often placing historical figures like John Quincy Adams at the top, but these lists are methodologically speculative: they rely on biographical inference, contemporaneous writings, or retrospective scoring models rather than contemporaneous, standardized IQ tests administered to those presidents ^{[5] [6]}. Such rankings frequently omit caveats about estimation error and fail to account for historical context, different educational standards, and the impossibility of retrofitting modern psychometrics to 18th- and 19th-century subjects. These pieces can be useful for comparative trivia but should not be conflated with documented, self‑reported IQ disclosures by presidents.

4. The persistence of the “IQ hoax” and its informational consequences

A long-running U.S. presidential IQ hoax—spread via emails and social posts—fabricated numbers and even non‑existent expert endorsements; researchers and journalists have traced and debunked these fabrications, noting that the purported sources quoted in the hoax do not exist ^[3]. The hoax persists because people seek a simple metric to evaluate leaders and social platforms amplify eye-catching claims without rigorous sourcing. The consequence is cyclic: fabricated figures circulate as “evidence,” drive public perceptions, and then require repeated debunking, which itself struggles to achieve the same reach as the original misinformation.

5. What this means for public discourse and how to evaluate claims

Given that no president has publicly disclosed a verifiable IQ score, consumers of political information should treat any numeric presidential IQ claim as extraordinary and in need of primary-source proof: an authenticated test report, a first‑person disclosure, or contemporaneous documentation from a credible authority. Reporting that cites estimated IQ rankings can be informative when presented as historical inference, but they are not substitutes for documented evidence; the Trump incidents and the debunked 73 image underscore the importance of distinguishing screening tests, self‑reports, and fabrications from validated intelligence testing and from official disclosures ^{[1] [2] [4]}.