SACRAMENTO — President Trump claims Gov. Gavin Newsom is unfit to be president because he has a “learning disability.” It’s a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.
The centuries-old pot-kettle idiom points out hypocrisy — as when one person accuses another of a flaw that afflicts himself.
California’s governor has battled dyslexia all his life — very successfully, by any measure. Dyslexia is a learning disability that makes reading and writing difficult. But it doesn’t mean a stricken person is unable to learn. He just needs to learn differently, as Newsom has done since he was a teen.
Trump apparently isn’t dyslexic. But he clearly has some learning disabilities — including stubbornness, narrow-mindedness and intolerance.
The president still hasn’t learned, for example, that he lost the 2020 election. He persists in the belief — or maybe it’s merely another boldface lie — that the election was stolen in a Joe Biden conspiracy. That’s a bizarre fantasy.
He also didn’t learn from past administrations that a commander in chief should not wage war against Iran without a concrete plan to keep open the Strait of Hormuz so Middle Eastern oil can keep flowing to the world.
And he never has learned what most of us were taught by our parents: that you don’t berate your friends if you expect to keep them friendly — lashing out, for instance, at allies before and after their balking at sending warships to help protect the vital strait.
Moreover, he didn’t learn that the nation’s founders embedded a checks-and-balances governing system in the Constitution and that Congress has a role in imposing tariffs.
When the normally Trump-friendly Supreme Court ruled against his unilateral tariff agenda, the spoiled president did what he usually does: attack, insulting the justices who struck down his edicts.
“Fools,” “lapdogs” and a “disgrace to our nation,” he whined. “It’s an embarrassment to their families.”
Trump still hasn’t learned to shut up and try to be civilized.
Not even after shocking everyone by saying of the late Republican Sen. John McCain, a Navy Pilot who spent more than five years as a tortured POW in the Hanoi Hilton: “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”
Any respect I might have had for the guy vanished in 2015 when the then-candidate for president publicly mocked a New York Times reporter’s disability. At a campaign rally, Trump jerked his arms and flailed his hands while making fun of the reporter’s palsy-like ailment.
So it wasn’t a surprise recently when Trump tore into Newsom for his dyslexia four times in one week.
Yes, Newsom has his eye on the 2028 presidential election and has been scoring points nationally with Democratic activists by using Trump as a punching bag. But Trump keeps offering himself up as an irresistible target.
Regardless, there’s no excuse — even in hard knocks politics — for attacking someone because of his disability.
“Gavin Newscum” — Trump’s synonym for the governor — ”has admitted he has learning disabilities, dyslexia,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “Honestly, I’m all for people with learning disabilities but not for my president.”
“Everything about him is dumb,” Trump added.
In a Fox News Radio interview, Trump said that “presidents can’t have a learning disability.” And on Facebook, Trump wrote: “I don’t want the president of the United States to have a cognitive deficiency.”
A quick Google search could have shown Trump that several presidents have had learning disabilities, including dyslexia.
Start with George Washington, who struggled with grammar and spelling. And Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, who had trouble with reading and spelling.
Other presidents with learning disabilities: Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. “It’s a poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word,” Jackson asserted.
Scientist Albert Einstein was dyslexic. So were Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison.
Dyslexia affects roughly one in five Americans to some degree — more than 40 million people, although relatively few are aware of it, according to researchers.
Newsom has spoken openly for years about his struggles with dyslexia. It’s difficult for him to read, especially prepared speeches. So he reads and re-reads, underlines and highlights and meticulously takes notes. When a speech must be read off a teleprompter, he practices for hours.
In January, the governor began his State of the State address to the Legislature with this ad-lib:
“I’m not shy or, you know, embarrassed about my 960 SAT score. But I am a little bit about my inability to read the written [speech] text. And so it’s always been something that I have to work through and I’m confronting.”
In his recently released autobiography, “Young Man in a Hurry,” Newsom writes: “My high school grades were all over the place and I scored lousy on the SAT, three hours of dyslexic torture.”
Early in his political career as a San Francisco supervisor, he writes, “speaking to a crowd was not unlike the fear I felt in third grade reading to my classmates …. So I learned to memorize my talking points and best lines … and wing it from there.
“This is how I discovered one of the secret powers of dyslexia. I could read a room with the best of them. I’d walk in and immediately size up the faces, mood and manners. … I learned that an audience didn’t mind occasional hiccups of speech as long as you looked them in the eye.”
Newsom was twice elected mayor and twice governor.
None of this means he should necessarily be elected president.
There may be policy and political reasons to consider him unfit — but not because of any learning disability.
What else you should be reading
The must-read: Newsom leads Harris for president among California Democrats, poll finds
The TK: Democrats excluded from USC gubernatorial debate urge rivals to boycott in solidarity
The L.A. Times Special: Rep. Eric Swalwell’s private AI company raises money, questions
Until next week,
George Skelton
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