{"id":12476,"date":"2026-04-03T07:45:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T07:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=12476"},"modified":"2026-04-03T07:45:00","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T07:45:00","slug":"dyslexia-comes-back-to-bite-president-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=12476","title":{"rendered":"Dyslexia Comes Back To Bite President Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By MIKE MAGEE<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The President\u2019s 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, \u201cEverything about him is dumb.\u201d<\/p>\n

In response, the governor broadened the conversation to include young Americans with the condition with these targeted words of encouragement, \u201c<\/em>To every kid with a learning disability: don\u2019t let anyone \u2014 not even the President of the United States \u2014 bully you. Dyslexia isn\u2019t a weakness. It\u2019s your strength.\u201d<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n

Trump seemed surprised by the blowback from his \u201cdumb\u201d remark. It drew a stern rebuke from the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity <\/a>which reminded the President that approximately 20% of the US population<\/a> is challenged by some form of this condition.<\/p>\n

Fellow dyslectic, author and political commentator, Molly Jong-Fast<\/a>,\u00a0 quickly connected the political dots to current events: \u201cMr. 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).\u201d<\/p>\n

As the Yale experts <\/a>put it, \u201cReading 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Neuroscientists couldn\u2019t agree more. Language is indeed complicated.\u00a0 At least five areas have been identified as role players in coordinating human capacity for language and speech.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

For the dyslexic, it\u2019s a problem with language processing.<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Gavin has been nothing short of an open book when it comes to dyslexia.\u00a0 On tour in support of his new memoir, \u201cYoung Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery\u201d<\/a> last month, he revealed the challenge of being a politician unable to read a speech. In Atlanta recently, he said, \u201cI\u2019m no better than you. You know, I\u2019m a 960 SAT guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ironically, Gavin\u2019s current critic has learning issues of his own. Back in 2019, Professor Harriet Feinberg Ed.D<\/a> from the Harvard Graduate School of Education took a close look at Trump\u2019s 1st term linguistic behavior and came to the conclusion that \u201cDyslexia may explain a lot about the twisted behavior of the president.\u201d<\/p>\n

Feinberg peg\u2019s Trump\u2019s reading level at 5th grade \u2013 \u201cenough 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Dr. Feinberg\u2019s experience, dyslexia doesn\u2019t predict every individual\u2019s fate. Personality has a huge impact on future outcomes. For Trump couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Dr Feinberg summarized <\/a>succinctly her evaluation during Trump\u2019s first term. She said he likely \u201cfaked and falsified his way to fame and power and enjoys overlording it over so-called \u201csmart\u201d people and thwarting their hopes. I am suggesting that Trump\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

According to Dr. Feinberg,\u00a0 dyslexia is the key to solving the mystery that is Donald Trump, a boy with a penchant for revenge. Summarizing, she explains, \u201cBecause it was so hard for him to learn from books\u2013coupled with his unwillingness to listen to people with deep knowledge and alternative perspectives\u2013he nurtured resentment and mistrust\u2026he 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\u00a0democracy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America\u2019s Medical-Industrial Complex.<\/a> (Grove\/2020)<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s action was premeditated and intended to take the potential Democratic 2028…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":12475,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12476"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12476\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}