Dyslexia Comes Back To Bite President Trump

By MIKE MAGEE

This past week, Donald Trump decided to get into a war of words with a person with dyslexia. His target was the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, who has struggled with the learning disability since the age of 5.

The President’s action was premeditated and intended to take the potential Democratic 2028 Presidential contender down a peg. It got pretty personal pretty fast. Trump was direct as is his way. He said simply, “Everything about him is dumb.”

In response, the governor broadened the conversation to include young Americans with the condition with these targeted words of encouragement, “To every kid with a learning disability: don’t let anyone — not even the President of the United States — bully you. Dyslexia isn’t a weakness. It’s your strength.”

Trump seemed surprised by the blowback from his “dumb” remark. It drew a stern rebuke from the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity which reminded the President that approximately 20% of the US population is challenged by some form of this condition.

Fellow dyslectic, author and political commentator, Molly Jong-Fast,  quickly connected the political dots to current events: “Mr. Trump is a bully, but beyond that he tries to flatten things. Sometimes voters respond to this flattening, this simplification of complicated issues, but ultimately his refusal to see nuance in things, his inability to plan ahead, to see second- or third-order effects is his undoing (see: this war he has gotten us into).”

As the Yale experts put it, “Reading is complex. It requires our brains to connect letters to sounds, put those sounds in the right order, and pull the words together into sentences and paragraphs we can read and comprehend. People with dyslexia have trouble matching the letters they see on the page with the sounds those letters and combinations of letters make. And when they have trouble with that step, all the other steps are harder.”

Neuroscientists couldn’t agree more. Language is indeed complicated.  At least five areas have been identified as role players in coordinating human capacity for language and speech.

For the dyslexic, it’s a problem with language processing. The learning issues vary widely and can include difficulties with word recognition, numeracy, spelling, writing, reading, word and symbol recognition. Taken together, these difficulties often translate into deficits in organization, motor skills, visual discernment, planning, social interaction, and short term memory. A common early flag is delayed literacy.

Gavin has been nothing short of an open book when it comes to dyslexia.  On tour in support of his new memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery” last month, he revealed the challenge of being a politician unable to read a speech. In Atlanta recently, he said, “I’m no better than you. You know, I’m a 960 SAT guy.”

Ironically, Gavin’s current critic has learning issues of his own. Back in 2019, Professor Harriet Feinberg Ed.D from the Harvard Graduate School of Education took a close look at Trump’s 1st term linguistic behavior and came to the conclusion that “Dyslexia may explain a lot about the twisted behavior of the president.”

Feinberg peg’s Trump’s reading level at 5th grade – “enough to tweet and to follow a teleprompter, but not enough to comprehend a longish article in the Wall Street Journal. . . He could never have read his textbooks at Wharton School. Someone would have had to read them aloud to him or create bullet points she would grasp the main ideas.”

In Dr. Feinberg’s experience, dyslexia doesn’t predict every individual’s fate. Personality has a huge impact on future outcomes. For Trump couldn’t measure up as a child, and likely began faking it at age 6 or 7 and never stopped. Early failures were covered up, paved over, and sheltered by family wealth and connections.

Dr Feinberg summarized succinctly her evaluation during Trump’s first term. She said he likely “faked and falsified his way to fame and power and enjoys overlording it over so-called “smart” people and thwarting their hopes. I am suggesting that Trump’s lifelong experience with dyslexia, instead of increasing his capacity for compassion, has instead combined with problematic elements in his personality, including a penchant for revenge that was apparent even when he was a young adult.”

Attacking Gavin Newsom for an inherited disability that the governor had the courage to disclose has come back to bite a President already under siege. Fakery, grandiosity, and cruelty work well for a media personality. But governing a nation by shelving expertise and knowledge, rejecting deep cultural experience and diplomacy (while surrounding yourself with loyal sycophants who you enjoy publicly torturing as you once did in the schoolyard, or under the glare of your fake televised boardroom) is clearly not a recipe for success.

According to Dr. Feinberg,  dyslexia is the key to solving the mystery that is Donald Trump, a boy with a penchant for revenge. Summarizing, she explains, “Because it was so hard for him to learn from books–coupled with his unwillingness to listen to people with deep knowledge and alternative perspectives–he nurtured resentment and mistrust…he exhibits a combative complacency, a receptivity to unworkable and dangerous ideas, an admiration of dictators, and an almost savage destructive push that is causing severe ongoing harm to our democracy.

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical-Industrial Complex. (Grove/2020)