**Jimmy Kimmel’s Single Question About Trump’s ‘High IQ’ Claim Ignites New Firestorm**
By Sarah Ellison
The New York Times
November 21, 2025
LOS ANGELES — President Trump’s long-standing boast that he possesses “one of the highest IQs” in American political history collided head-on with late-night television Thursday night when Jimmy Kimmel posed a deceptively simple question that has since ricocheted across social media and sent the former president’s inner circle into a familiar frenzy.
During the opening monologue of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” Mr. Kimmel played a fresh clip from Mr. Trump’s Wednesday interview with Fox News in which the president, unprompted, declared: “People don’t realize how smart I am. I have a very high IQ. Probably the highest of any president, maybe ever. They tested me. It’s off the charts.”
Mr. Kimmel let the studio audience finish its mix of laughter and groans, then leaned into the camera with a calm, almost professorial tone.
“Mr. President,” he said, pausing just long enough for the room to fall silent, “if your IQ is truly that high, can you tell us—right now, no notes, no teleprompter—what a standard deviation is?”
The audience erupted. The question, delivered without embellishment, hung in the air for a beat before Mr. Kimmel added dryly, “We’ll wait.”
He did not, in fact, wait. The show cut immediately to a graphic of a ticking clock superimposed over a freeze-frame of Mr. Trump mid-boast. The clock ran for 45 seconds—roughly the length of time analysts say it would take someone familiar with basic statistics to answer—before Mr. Kimmel shrugged and moved on. “That’s okay,” he said. “Most of us learned it in tenth grade. Some of us apparently skipped that day.”
The segment, which lasted less than two minutes, has been viewed more than 22 million times across platforms in the 18 hours since it aired. On X, #StandardDeviation trended ahead of every major news event Thursday night, fueled by a flood of memes juxtaposing Mr. Trump’s claim with screenshots of high-school statistics textbooks.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on whether the president could, in fact, define the term. Aboard Air Force One en route to a rally in Georgia, Mr. Trump posted a series of messages on Truth Social dismissing the question as “another gotcha from failing Hollywood” and insisting that “only low-IQ people care about nerd stuff like that.” He then pivoted to a familiar refrain: “I went to Wharton—best school, best grades, everybody knows it.”
Inside Mar-a-Lago, however, aides described a scene of controlled chaos. Three people with knowledge of the evening said senior communications staff were summoned to an impromptu meeting shortly after the monologue aired. One adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the president demanded to know why no one had prepared a pre-emptive response to “statistical trick questions.” Another recounted Mr. Trump asking aloud whether standard deviation was “something Crooked Hillary made up.”
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a staunch Trump defender, weighed in on X at 11:47 p.m., writing, “Real Americans don’t care about liberal math traps. They care about putting America first.” The post drew more than 40,000 replies, many of them simply the definition of standard deviation copied and pasted from Wikipedia.
Mr. Kimmel, who has made a cottage industry of fact-checking Mr. Trump’s superlatives, appeared almost surprised by the intensity of the reaction. In a brief phone interview Friday morning, he said he chose the question precisely because it was “neutral, nonpartisan, and something any college-educated adult should be able to answer in one sentence.” He added: “I wasn’t trying to humiliate anyone. I was just curious.”
Curiosity, in this case, proved combustible. By Friday afternoon, late-night peers had piled on: Stephen Colbert devoted an entire “Big Fur Hat” segment to possible Trump answers (“It’s the deviation from being standard, which I am—tremendously”), while Seth Meyers ran a mock multiple-choice quiz titled “IQ or No IQ?”
For Mr. Trump, whose academic transcripts from the University of Pennsylvania remain sealed and who has repeatedly refused to release standardized test scores, the moment landed on a particularly sensitive nerve. It also underscored a broader pattern: boasts about intellect that, when subjected to even mild scrutiny, often invite precisely the skepticism he seeks to dispel.
Whether the episode will linger beyond the weekend viral cycle is uncertain. Yet in an era when political discourse is increasingly measured in clips and ratios, Mr. Kimmel’s 45-second clock may prove more memorable—and more damaging—than any policy debate of the week.
