Vice President JD Vance claims President Donald Trump has one of the highest, if not the highest, IQs out of any president in American history.
He made the claim during an appearance on The Diary of A CEO podcast, during which he claimed that he is “embarrassed” thinking back to 2016, when he did not believe that Trump, whom he said at the time may be “America’s Hitler,” was intelligent.
“I remember this in 2016, and in hindsight, it’s just so, so dumb,” Vance said of his previous thinking. “People would say that [Trump] was dumb, or that he wasn’t very smart.”
He continued, “He’s super smart, like he reads a lot, he understands people at an instinctual level better than anybody that I’ve ever known, but he is a very, very, like, from a pure IQ perspective, he’s a very smart person.”
IQ tests quantify one’s ability to reason, solve problems, and process information quickly.
Vance, who did a 180 on Trump as it became convenient for his own political ambitions, made his biggest claim in his next sentence.
“If you give Donald Trump an IQ test with the other 45, 46, presidents that the United States has had, I guarantee he’d be either near the top or at the top,” he said. “The entire American media in 2016 had convinced me, at least, that he was not a smart person.”
If true, that would place the 80-year-old Trump, who has a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, in the same sphere as some of the most intelligent figures in U.S. history.
That includes the Harvard-educated John Quincy Adams, who spoke seven languages and had an estimated IQ of 175, and Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson, who was such an avid reader that he had over 6,000 volumes in his personal library that he sold to the Library of Congress after the British burned the original national collection in 1814.
Trump, meanwhile, has had his fair share of mental lapses that call his intelligence into question.
Trump asked during a COVID-19 news conference in 2020 if disinfectants like bleach could be injected into the body or used to treat the virus; boasted this year about scoring a “perfect 30 out of 30” on a cognitive test, when he actually underwent a dementia screening; and claimed in 2019 that windmills somehow cause cancer.
Vance’s interview is part of his press tour this week to promote his new memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, which has already been hit with devastating reviews from the conservative Wall Street Journal and The Cut, with the latter being particularly unimpressed by Vance’s telling of his home life and his conversion to Catholicism in his mid-30s.
“I got a colonoscopy on Friday,” Ginny Hogan wrote this week for The Cut. “If only that were the least pleasant experience of my last week. But no, that would be when I pulled an all-nighter on Monday reading Communion.”
