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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
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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