JD Vance Swears Donald Trump Has the Highest IQ of Any President

JD Vance spent part of his memoir press tour this week guaranteeing that Donald Trump would outscore nearly every president in American history on an IQ test, and the internet was not built to let that one slide. The clip traveled fast, the comment sections filled up within hours, and the guarantee that was supposed to flatter the boss turned into a running joke by the afternoon.

The Vice President made the claim on The Diary of a CEO, the podcast hosted by entrepreneur Steven Bartlett, while promoting his new book Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. The episode dropped Thursday and covered everything from the war in Iran to whether aliens are real, but the line that spread fastest was the one about presidential brainpower. Vance said the American media had convinced him over the years that Trump lacked intelligence, then claimed that working beside him flipped that view completely.

His exact words were direct. JD Vance said that if you gave Donald Trump an IQ test against the other 45 presidents the country has had, he guaranteed Trump would land either near the top or at the top. He went further, painting a softer portrait of life inside the Oval Office, describing Trump as a man who loves hospitality, likes giving gifts, and enjoys making people happy. He called him super smart and a heavy reader, and said the version of Trump people see arguing with journalists is a flat, narrow picture of a far more layered figure.

The guarantee would carry more weight if it had not arrived in the same news cycle as one of Trump’s more memorable geography moments. Earlier this week, standing beside the Emir of Qatar, Trump described Qatar as sharing a walkable border with Iran, telling the room that other countries have to travel about 45 minutes to get there while Qatar could walk right across. Qatar and Iran do not share a border. They are separated by the Persian Gulf, roughly 119 miles of open water. The timing did Vance no favors.

JD Vance has had his own rough stretch under the lights. Two days before the podcast, he sat on The View and got fact checked to his face, pushing back on Trump’s documented ties to Jeffrey Epstein by suggesting the friendship was a 1980s thing when reporting places it firmly through the 1990s. The hosts did not let it go. So the picture forming this week is a Vice President vouching for the highest IQ in presidential history while getting corrected on basic facts on daytime television.

What makes the hype land even stranger is the man delivering it. JD Vance was once one of Trump’s loudest critics. He wrote against him in conservative magazines, called his appeal cultural heroin, and in a private message that later went public, wondered aloud whether Trump might be America’s Hitler. That was 2016. The same man now guarantees on a global podcast that Trump is one of the smartest people to ever hold the office. The turnaround has been complete, and the timing of this particular endorsement, with 2028 on the horizon, was not lost on anyone watching.

This is the role JD Vance has taken on inside the administration, the designated explainer who softens whatever Trump says and reframes whatever Trump does. On the same podcast he argued that Trump’s most controversial comments, including the old remarks about immigration, are usually taken out of context. The IQ guarantee fits the pattern. It is less an observation than a job, and he performs it with the energy of a man who knows who signs off on the next chapter of his career.

The IQ talk itself is old territory for this administration. Trump has been bragging about his intelligence since at least 2016, once challenging then secretary of state Rex Tillerson to compare scores after reports that Tillerson had called him a moron. He has spent years boasting about acing a cognitive test, the one where the achievement is identifying a series of animals in a row. None of that is an actual IQ score, because Trump has never released one. The number does not exist in any verifiable form, which makes a guarantee about where it would rank a tough thing to back up.

There is also the small matter of the math. JD Vance referenced the other 45 presidents, but Donald Trump is counted as both the 45th and the 47th president, which means the actual number of people who held the office before him is 44, not 45. It is a tiny error, the kind that would mean nothing on its own. Stacked on top of a week full of corrections, it became one more thing for the timeline to chew on. The clip has been circulating for hours, the comment sections are full of people remembering exactly what Vance used to say about Trump back when he was free to say it, and the guarantee that was meant to praise the boss has mostly become a reminder that loyalty and accuracy do not always travel together.