President Donald Trump thought he was landing a blow when he declared California Gov. Gavin Newsom unfit for the presidency because of his dyslexia, but in doing so, he exposed a fatal flaw.
That's the argument from New York Times contributing Opinion writer Molly Jong-Fast, who has dyslexia herself — and was expelled from private school as a child because of it. In a blistering op-ed on Monday, she dismantled Trump's attack while exposing what she described as his fundamental flaw.
“With a low-I.Q. person, you know, because Gavin Newscum has admitted that he is a — that he has learning disabilities," Trump said last week. "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.”
Jong-Fast was having none of it. Dyslexia, she argued, forces people to think around corners, to memorize, adapt, and find creative pathways through problems that others never have to solve. Up to 20 percent of the American population has it, including, by some accounts, Albert Einstein.
"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," she wrote.
Newsom, she added, has turned his dyslexia into a political superpower. He memorizes speeches whole, processing teleprompter text as single images, cataloguing facts and data in ways she immediately recognized.
Trump, meanwhile, does the opposite.
"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)," she wrote.
And Jong-Fast said it's catching up with him.
"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," she added.