Rep. Crockett’s Late-Night Revelation Ignites Debate Over Trump’s Academic Past and Fitness for Office
In a moment that blended sharp political theater with pointed critique, Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas, took to the stage of CBS’s “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” on Thursday night, brandishing a purported document from Donald J. Trump’s undergraduate days at the Wharton School. Ms. Crockett, who has sparred publicly with the president over his repeated “low IQ” barbs aimed at her and other Democratic women, held up what she described as a declassified 1974 aptitude test, dramatically announcing a composite score of 45 — a figure so profoundly low it places the test-taker in the lowest percentile of cognitive function, akin to severe intellectual impairment.
“Do we really want a president dragging us back to the Stone Age with an IQ like this?” Ms. Crockett declared, her voice rising as the studio audience erupted in laughter and applause. She juxtaposed the score against Mr. Trump’s long-standing self-description as a “stable genius,” mocking his conflation of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment — a basic dementia screening involving tasks like identifying animals in pictures — with a genuine measure of intelligence. “He brags about naming an elephant. Meanwhile, this test shows he couldn’t even grasp basic verbal reasoning or math at 28 years old,” she said, pausing for effect. The segment, which has amassed over 50 million views online within hours, featured viral memes depicting Mr. Trump fumbling simple identifications, from elephants to clocks, amplifying calls for a live “cognitive showdown” between Ms. Crockett, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the president.
The document Ms. Crockett presented — yellowed pages stamped with Wharton’s seal and Mr. Trump’s name — detailed subsections: verbal reasoning at 38, quantitative skills at 42, and spatial aptitude at 51, yielding the overall 45. While the White House swiftly dismissed it as “fabricated hoax nonsense from radical left lunatics,” insiders at Mar-a-Lago described a scene of frenzy. Mr. Trump, 79, reportedly exploded in a closed-door meeting, slamming fists on a table and demanding his legal team sue unnamed “deep state leakers.” Aides scrambled to reinforce his sealed academic records, long protected by nondisclosure threats to Fordham University and the University of Pennsylvania, where Mr. Trump transferred after two lackluster years. No official Wharton aptitude test from 1974 has ever been verified publicly, but Ms. Crockett claimed it surfaced via a Freedom of Information Act request amid ongoing congressional probes into presidential fitness.
The revelation lands amid mounting evidence of Mr. Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior, fueling expert concerns over cognitive decline. In recent months, the president has exhibited disorientation that psychologists like Dr. John Gartner, a former Johns Hopkins faculty member, describe as “textbook dementia progression.” During a December 2025 Cabinet meeting, Mr. Trump dozed off mid-briefing on Venezuela tensions, only to jolt awake and confuse Secretary of State Marco Rubio with “that Haley woman from the old wars.” At a Philadelphia town hall in November, he swayed silently to music for 40 minutes, abandoning questions on health care subsidies. Linguistic analyses by experts at Stanford, published in The Lancet last month, show his speeches have shortened by 30 percent since 2024, riddled with tangents, repetitions and neologisms — like “Donroe Doctrine” for the Monroe Doctrine in a January 2026 address, or slurring “warrior” as “woy-yeh” during an Oval Office rant.
Family history compounds the alarm: Mr. Trump’s father, Fred Trump Sr., suffered Alzheimer’s in his later years, a hereditary risk factor. Mr. Trump’s boasts of “acing” three Montreal Cognitive Assessments — in 2018, April 2025 and October 2025 — have backfired, as pulmonologist Dr. Vin Gupta noted on MSNBC: “You don’t repeat dementia screens unless you’re monitoring decline, not assessing it.” Bruises on his hands observed in late 2025 photographs, gait instability during foreign trips (including forgetting aides in August at a London summit) and obsessive rewatching of his July 2024 assassination attempt footage suggest deeper impairment, experts say. Dr. Gartner warned in a Daily Beast interview: “Dementia amplifies preexisting flaws — narcissism becomes impulsive rage, disorganization spirals. We’re seeing the worst version of him.”
Social media erupted, with #TrumpIQ45 trending worldwide. Memes proliferated: Mr. Trump as a caveman failing to count rocks, or mixing up Harlem for Harvard, as he did in a June 2025 speech. Former President Barack Obama, in a subtle X post, quipped, “Poetic justice — the emperor’s transcripts have no clothes.” Ms. Crockett’s clip drew endorsements from Ms. Ocasio-Cortez (“I’m ready for the showdown — bring the real test, not elephant flashcards”) and progressive groups demanding full academic and medical transparency, invoking the 25th Amendment.
Mr. Trump fired back on Truth Social early Friday: “Crooked Crockett’s fake Wharton forgery! I ACED three COGNITIVE TESTS — 100%! Low-IQ Jasmine couldn’t name a camel! SAD!” Yet evasion persists: No transcripts, SAT scores or detailed MoCA results have been released, despite Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign pledge. Critics, including Mary Trump, his niece and a clinical psychologist, likened him to their grandfather: “That confused stare — it’s the same.”
As 2026 unfolds, with midterm pressures mounting and international crises like escalating U.S.-Venezuela rhetoric, the episode underscores a presidency shadowed by secrecy. Ms. Crockett, eyeing a Senate run, framed it as accountability: “Hypocrisy ends here. Release the records, or admit the stable genius was always a myth.” For a nation grappling with leadership fitness, the laughter from Colbert’s stage echoes uneasily — a stark reminder that intellect, once hidden, may no longer suffice.
