Yesterday I asked ‘Does Trump's praise of Putin mean he's close to becoming psychotic or just Trump being Trump?” Bottom line is that we can’t answer the question posed in that diary.
What we can know with absolute certainty is that he is painfully ignorant not only about matters a president must know about but his general knowledge is probably less that that of a reasonably intelligent fifth grader.
This is from this Slate article: Trump’s Nuclear Meltdown, Oct. 1i, 2017, according to the web address it was original titled “Now we know why Rex Tillerson called Trump a moron” though they didn’t say what Tillerson reportedly said omitting the f-word.
All presidents are ignorant of certain issues when they come into office. Most are aware of their shortcomings and take care to study up on what they need to know. The uniqueness of Trump is that he has almost no self-awareness, deals with his flaws by projecting them onto others, and seems allergic to study. He has asked for his daily briefing to contain no more than three subjects, with no more than one page devoted to each, and containing only the consensus judgment with no space for dissenting views within the intelligence community. Presidents have easy access to the most highly classified information and, if they want, the most knowledgeable experts, in or out of government, on any subject. Yet Trump learns most of what he knows from Fox News and Breitbart.
I am sure you recall these stories:
I didn’t include link since you’d waste a free click on these subscription websites. If you want to find them each for “who said Trump was a moron”
Washington Post writer Aaron Blake detailed the growing list (subscrption) of former President Donald Trump's "botched" comments on the invasion of Ukraine. RawStory summarized the Post article here.
So while we may never know what an MMPI would tell us about Trump’s personalty,* we can be quite sure that despite his bragging my discussions with two retired clinical psychologists who gave hundreds of IQ tests is that his score might not even be as high as 100 which is considered average. They say that his general knowledge score on an IQ test would make him a candidate not for any public office but for a remedial class in elementary school.
Of course nobody knows what his actual scores on an IQ test were if they even exist. This has been written about here and here for example. I strongly doubt any of the indices used to estimate Trump’s IQ such as his admission as a transfer student to undergraduate study for his last two years at the University of Pennsylvania’s (not the grad program he wants you to believe he graduated from with an MBA). His transcript has never been released and if it were it would be meaningless since I strongly suspect any high grades would have been the result of paying students to cheat for him. Many of you remember the allegations, including one made by Mary Trump in her book, that he paid someone named Joe Shapiro to take his SAT exam.
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* The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is a standardized psychometric test of adult personality and psychopathology. Psychologists and other mental health professionals use various versions of the MMPI to help develop treatment plans, assist with differential diagnosis, help answer legal questions (forensic psychology), screen job candidates during the personnel selection process, or as part of a therapeutic assessment procedure. Wikipedia
The Poll:
What do you think Trump’s true IQ is?
IQ (or intelligence quotient) exams have been around for about 100 years, in various forms. Today, they are given in schools to see if children are gifted or have other special needs, and by businesses and other employers. You can also find ‘do-it-yourself’ IQ tests online, if you are curious what your score is.
But once you get a score, what does that number truly mean? How do tests that purport to measure intelligence work, and do the scores actually reflect your brain power? How does your IQ test score compare with that of others taking such tests?
IQ Score Ranges and What They Mean
Most of the widely used IQ tests today try to measure key abilities, such as language, math ability, spatial ability, and others. They also test for logic, abstract reasoning, learning ability, and how well you retain information.
Common IQ tests, such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, use a scoring method based on comparisons of your score to other people of your same gender and age. These scores fall along a bell-type curve, with most people scoring in the middle and much smaller percentages of test-takers scoring in the high and low ends. Only about 2% of people are classified in the highest IQ category, for example.
Here is a typical IQ test score range. Keep in mind these numbers may differ slightly depending on which test you take.
- 111 - 119: Above-average intelligence
- 90 - 109: Average intelligence
- 80 - 89: Low-average intelligence
- 70 - 79: Borderline intelligence
- 69 and below: Extremely low intelligence
Another IQ test places 85 to 115 as the average range, with 145 as the start of high IQ and 160 or higher as "genius-level." Reference
