FACT CHECK: Was Trump’s IQ ‘Discovered’ To Be 73?

June 14th, 2019

An image shared on Facebook suggests that President Donald Trump has an IQ score of 73, citing a supposed test from his youth that had recently been “discovered.”

 

“I don’t think this should be news to anybody,” the image, styled like a news article, quotes one person as saying. “The guy’s clearly a total moron.”

Verdict: False

This story is a hoax. No news outlets have reported on it, and the photos used in the meme are miscaptioned.

Fact Check:

Trump attended the New York Military Academy (NYMA) for high school and graduated in 1964. This post, representing itself as a news clipping, claims that during his time there, Trump may have taken a test to measure his IQ, or intelligence quotient.

“The results of an IQ test that President Donald Trump allegedly took during his first year at New York Military Academy have been discovered in a file box in a closet in Brooklyn. According to the test results, Trump’s IQ is 73,” the image reads.

The post claims that someone named William Askew Jr. uncovered the document while clearing out his late father’s home. “Dad was the school counselor at NYMA from 1955 to 1985,” it quotes him as saying. “He didn’t administer these tests, but he was in charge of collecting them and sending them to the grading office.”

Trump is notorious for touting his intelligence, so if the post were true, it would be a bombshell – an IQ score in the low 70s is significantly below average. “Nearly 70 percent of the population has an IQ between 85 and 115 on most tests,” reads the website for MENSA.

However, no news outlets have covered this story, and it appears nowhere credible online. The story is a hoax.

There’s one other indication that the story is fake. The meme claims to show photos of Askew and his father, yet both are miscaptioned. As reported by Snopes, the supposed picture of Askew comes from a stock photo website, labelled “portrait of an elderly man.” The image captioned as Askew’s father is actually of Lawrence Hanson, then-principal of Grand Forks Central High School in North Dakota. The photo is dated 1950.

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Aryssa Damron

Fact Check Reporter