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What does everyone think Trump’s IQ is? I feel like you need to be pretty smart to be a billionaire/POTUS even if he had rich parents but speaking as someone who loves the guy he is so inarticulate and has such weird speech patterns that it’s really hard to gauge what’s going on under the hood so to speak. I think probably like 125 with +3 sigma charisma & will-to-power
125ish sounds reasonable to me. I'd estimate U.S. Presidential IQ to fall within a 120-140 band, with rare exceptions above and below. I'd put Trump below the median, but not by a lot. Joe Biden might be an exception a bit below 120, and Bill Clinton is probably the highest-IQ recent President, though not above 140. For the highest-IQ Presidents, I'd look at John Quincy Adams and maybe a couple other not-recent candidates.
I won't pretend to any special expertise here, but will note that many of those who do are very often hilarously wrong with political bias swamping any actual signal, especially with recent Presidents. Neither Trump nor GWB is a drooling idiot, and Obama is far from an unparalleled genius, to take the most obvious examples. All three are...pretty average, as Presidential intelligence goes, and markedly above average compared to the general population.
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Trump's expertise is so domain specific and doable by a range range of IQs, that it's impossible try to extrapolate a specific IQ from it. If his specialty was theoretical physics, fine ,we could estimate 140+. But real estate is something doable by a much wider range of IQs. HIs IQ could be as low as 110 but possibly as high as 140+. Also, no proxies for IQ like SATs. Speech patterns are not that useful either.
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The intelligence researcher Emil Kirkegaard recently put out an informal poll among his followers asking people to estimate the IQs of various rationalists and other public figures, Trump among them. You can vote here or see the results here. Emil also discussed the results on his substack.
Out of 495 responses, the IQ estimate for Trump is a mean and mode of about 120 (SD 15.8).
But many of these estimates for seem hilariously off in either direction, probably depending on how liked or disliked the figure is.
I saw that, surprised nobody has made a post here about it. I think I had almost everyone on there about 10 pts higher than the average except for Spencer, varg, Kanye, Fuentes and Tate, which maybe is a point against my ability to estimate IQ
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125 seems far too high, to be honest. I try to be cognizant of the fact that as someone with a high verbal IQ, I’m primed to overestimate the intelligence of people who are good at talking/writing, while underestimating the intelligence of those who are more numbers-oriented and less verbal. I’m also open to the possibility that Trump’s horribly-written, simplistic, juvenile tweeting and bizarre manner of speech is an affectation meant to appeal to a particular audience, and that behind the scenes he could be very different from what his public persona would suggest. All that being said, given that his business model and method of achieving success, at least as laid out in (the ghost-written) The Art Of The Deal, appears to have consisted of an elaborate series of bluffs and manipulations, I don’t know how much I should draw a connection between that and intelligence. While that certainly demonstrates a high level of interpersonal/social intelligence, and a sort of low animal cunning, I don’t know that it’s suggestive of a high cognitive processing capacity, nor any ability to effectively synthesize complex information and generate novel ideas as a result. I’m gonna say 110, but heavily weighted toward empathic forms of intelligence.
I feel like it’s pretty clear by now that he’s not playing a character, which is what makes him so interesting to me. I might’ve internalized the IQ-supremacy point of view where “street smart vs book smart” isn’t a real distinction of intelligence (just high IQ applied differently) too much, which is why I’m overestimating him. It just seems like you have to be pretty high IQ to take “street smarts” as far as he has despite coming across as not very intelligent. I also would be interested to know how difficult it was to get into UPenn back then even assuming a lot of nepotism involved, as that would be a good data point to try and estimate a floor for his IQ
He definitely exaggerates and plays himself up. He's admitted as much. But it's just an exaggeration of his own traits, not making up a personality wholesale Colbert Report style. Trump is similar to Andrew Tate imo, where he'll purposefully say outrageous things he doesn't actually believe, but he does believe a more moderate version that's not quite so outrageous, but still firmly right-wing. Like Trump didn't literally want all Muslims banned from entering the USA- but he did have a temporary ban for entry from seven Muslim states and greatly reduced refugee resettlement.
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