I was 8 years old when I was asked to leave the fancy private school where my aunt had been a teacher. It was a bit of irony; the daughter and granddaughter of writers couldn’t read.
It didn’t matter how many flash cards I studied. It didn’t matter how many sessions I had with the reading tutor. None of it mattered: The letters didn’t match the sounds. As hard as I tried, my brain just couldn’t make sense of the data.
It’s difficult to explain just how disappointed my family was. I came from a family of people who were good at school and here I was so bad at school that a school was telling me I had to leave. My famous writer mother was told I couldn’t hack it. The school made the calculation that I couldn’t catch up and would never be able to catch up and so it was suggested I find another school better suited to my needs.
I had dyslexia. I still have it today. And as much as 20 percent of the U.S. population has it too. That includes the Democrat who the current president of the United States seems most worried might become the next one, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
Last week, in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump declared that dyslexia made Mr. Newsom ineligible, in his eyes, for the job. “With a low-IQ person, you know, because Gavin Newscum has admitted that he is a — that he has learning disabilities. Honestly, I’m all for people with learning disabilities, but not for my president. I don’t want, I think a president should not have learning disabilities, OK? And I know it’s highly controversial to say such a horrible thing.”
Mr. Trump is at his core an insult comic, if not a particularly funny one. He has a bully’s habit of disparaging women he finds impertinent as “piggy,” “stupid and nasty” or just “nasty,” not to mention “low IQ,” and, of course, portraying certain Black people as apes. There are too many Trumpian slurs over the years to list here, but he’s not shied away from mocking the disabled. Who can forget when he derisively imitated the Times reporter Serge Kovaleski’s arthrogryposis, a disability that limits the functioning of joints?
Often these comments are directed at people Mr. Trump fears might be better or smarter than he is, and his obsession with Mr. Newsom makes sense: In Mr. Trump’s central casting view of the world, Mr. Newsom looks like a president. Frankly, more than Mr. Trump does. On top of that, Mr. Newsom has celebrity friends and is clearly having a lot of fun trolling the president on social media. So Mr. Trump, who spends a great deal of time telling anybody who will listen how smart he is himself — “very stable genius” and all that — needed to try to put the governor in his place.
But it’s a particularly odd thing to say about dyslexics.
I’m not saying people with dyslexia are smarter, though Albert Einstein is believed to have been dyslexic and he was pretty smart. But dyslexia forces you to think around corners that other people don’t have to. One of the things that people with dyslexia do — it’s something I did — is learn to navigate our weird brains. I never learned phonics; I had to memorize words in their entirety because I could never sound them out. We avoid things that can embarrass us, like reading aloud, though now I’m so good at it I can read a TV teleprompter that features a moving wall of text, something that would have terrified young me.
As a New Yorker profile published last month discusses, Mr. Newsom had to negotiate these same challenges, and did so using similar methods: “Newsom rarely gives long written speeches; instead, he memorizes. (He sees the lines of text on a teleprompter screen as a single image, like a Chinese character, which he uses to recall the next line.)”
We dyslexics navigate the pathways that work for us. We move the letters around. My father told me he knew I was dyslexic because I couldn’t tell him what the letters meant well into middle school. Now teaching for dyslexics is much more sophisticated but I never got that kind of targeted instruction. Like so many in my age group, I found tricks, and those tricks turn into skills, and eventually we’re just like everyone else.
But maybe these tricks, these skills, make us just the slightest bit more creative and more interesting. Having to survive in a world where everyone else could read and write made me cunning.
In 2023, Mr. Newsom debated Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Neither man got the nomination of his party, but Mr. Newsom showed himself to be a skilled debater — someone who memorized facts and data in a way I recognized. Watching him, I could see him trying to negotiate the facts, the data, the ideas he’d cataloged in his brain. There is something strange and maybe a little wonderful about spending so much time thinking about how you process information and make sense of the world. Watching him speak, I recognize in my own way of communicating, what the journalist Nathan Heller means when he writes in the Newsom profile: “His movements through the language can be weird. (“The rule of law, not the rule of Don, and I hope it’s dawning on people” is a construction that he has found fit to repeat on air.)”
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). Not being able to see texture makes him miss things. Ignoring complexity, refusing nuance, rejecting the multitudes means you end up missing much of the most important and intellectually stimulating aspects of life. Later in his Oval Office remarks, he said of Mr. Newsom, “Everything about him is dumb.”
Which of course says much more about Mr. Trump than Mr. Newsom.
Molly Jong-Fast is the host of the “Fast Politics” podcast and the author of “How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir.”
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