Was President Trump’s IQ revealed to be only 73? Fact Check

ByCraig Haley

Claims online assert that President Trump has an IQ of only 73.

FALSE

In 2019 and 2020, rumours asserted that the President of the United States, President Donald Trump, had a significantly lower-than-average IQ of only 73.

Typically, such rumours present their evidence as a newspaper clipping of a story detailing how the results of an IQ test Donald Trump had taken at the New York Military Academy were discovered when a then-school counsellor’s closet was being cleaned out by his son.

A copy of this newspaper clipping is presented below.

However, the claim is false, since the clipping does not appear to be genuine. Any online searches using the phrases in the story fail to turn up the original story or the publication in which the story is purported to have appeared in. Likewise, no other media outlets have picked up on the story, which would have inevitably happened if the story had even a grain of truth to it.

However the newspaper clipping contains even more obvious clues that it is not genuine when we take a look at the specific information included. For one, any searches for “William Askew Jr”, the person who apparently found the buried IQ test, return results related only to this newspaper clipping.


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Additionally, the photos in the clipping that apparently depict William Askew Jr and his school councillor father show that neither men are in way related to this story or with President Trump. A reverse image search reveals the photo on the left is a generic stock photo, in one instance with the title “portrait of an elderly man”. The other photo traces back to the Grand Forks Central High School website, where the photo apparently depicts the principal, principal Hanson, from 1950. President Trump has no known connection to this school.

As such, it appears this newspaper clipping is nothing more than a forgery, designed specifically to make it appear like a legitimate story about Trump having an IQ score of only 73.

In reality, while Trump himself has often touted of having a particularly high IQ, no such IQ score has ever been released to the public, by Trump or anyone else.