President Donald Trump praised his own brainpower during a speech in North Carolina on Wednesday, September 16, 2026, crediting himself with a $1 adjustment to a bonus check for U.S. service members.
“So it came out to my desk, ‘Sir, we can give $1,775,'” Trump said. “I looked at the number, and I said, ‘Wait a minute, for $1 more, it’s $1,776,’ which is pretty good.”
He continued: “I was quite impressed with my intelligence. I’m a high-IQ person, after all.”
The checks, billed as a “warrior dividend,” went to service members over the holidays last year, and Trump has claimed the idea as his own. Lawmakers, though, had already appropriated the money, earmarking $2.9 billion in a supplemental package for military housing. Trump also said everyone had told him that reaching the $1,776 figure would be impossible.
The Test He Keeps Citing
The president has returned to the subject of his intelligence often, and his preferred evidence is the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. In May 2026, he said he had achieved a perfect score and presented the result as proof of how smart he is.
The Montreal Cognitive Assessment is not an intelligence test. Clinicians use it to screen for signs of cognitive decline and dementia, and it is the exam behind the “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.” recall sequence that Trump made famous. Doctors say the fact that he has taken it at least three times is itself cause for concern.
High IQ as AI Policy
The boast is not confined to applause lines. Amid mounting public anxiety over artificial intelligence, Trump posted on Truth Social on Monday, September 14, that the only “guardrails” the technology needs are “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” In the same post, he wrote that his administration had stopped AI figures — singling out Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei — from doing bad or potentially bad things, and said the government already holds sweeping criminal and regulatory power over the companies. He described opposition to AI and data centers as a conspiracy theory that benefits only China.
Trump was pushing back against Amodei, who published a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, September 12, arguing for slower AI development. Amodei wrote that the risks are serious because the technology is powerful, and that a commercially driven race to the bottom sharpens them. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk both backed and shared the statement.
On Sunday, September 13, speaking at a golf tournament in Ireland, Trump said the country is ahead of China and that he wants to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins. Aboard Air Force One the same day, he rejected reports that he is downplaying the risks, predicting the technology’s benefits would far outweigh its harms.
Researchers inside and outside the industry see the problem differently. Anthropic safety researcher Jacob Coxon announced he was stepping down out of fear that AI development amounted to gambling with people’s lives, and concern over the prospect of AI superintelligence has spread since. Princeton University computer science professor Arvind Narayanan, who co-wrote “AI as Normal Technology” and “AI Snake Oil,” said controls and guardrails are badly needed, and that a slowdown would matter only if companies used the time to change course and repair the organizational failures behind recent hacking incidents. He added that AI’s economic effect will be shaped by the slow work of integrating it into companies, governments and institutions, leaving no conflict between control and benefit.
Emily M. Bender, who teaches computational linguistics at the University of Washington, took the criticism a step further, calling the guardrail concept misguided because it shifts accountability from people inside corporations onto software that cannot be held accountable. She also rejected the premise of a race, saying the destination is ill-defined and that terms like artificial general intelligence and superintelligence lack solid definitions anywhere.
A Boast With a Long History
Trump has been defending his intellect in public for years. In 2018, tweeting from Camp David, Maryland, he called his mental stability and intelligence his two greatest lifelong assets and described himself as “a very stable genius.” The posts were a response to author Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” which quoted former chief strategist Steve Bannon and other advisers questioning the president’s competence.
Speaking to reporters that day, Trump, whose bachelor’s degree comes from the University of Pennsylvania, said he had gone to the best colleges, had been an excellent student and had won the presidency on his first attempt. He dismissed Wolff’s book as fiction. Then-White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders brushed aside questions about his mental fitness as disgraceful and laughable, noting that he had defeated a strong Republican field. His chief of staff at the time, John Kelly, said the tweets were unfamiliar to him until journalists put them in front of him.
The Reaction Online
Video of the North Carolina remark, posted by the Bulwark Clips account on September 17, drew a stream of derision, with the Governor Newsom Press Office account among those piling on. Reply after reply made the same point: genuinely intelligent people do not advertise it, and the real test of this president’s intelligence is what he has said and done in public.