Serious question: “Is Trump Functionally Illiterate?”
I’m not trying to be funny. This is a very real question with serious implications. It’s a question that has been on my mind for more than a year, and I’ve been paying close attention looking for explanations for evidence to the contrary that might derail my theory (like his obsessive tweeting or reading teleprompters.) I believe the President of the United States is functionally illiterate. Let me explain.
There is ample evidence that Trump… if not borderline illiterate... has great difficulty reading & writing above a 5th grade level. Yes, he tweets like a hyperactive teenager who can’t stop obsessing over what Cindy-Lou called him at lunch, but there is plenty of “Speech-to-Text” software out there to do the typing for him and would explain his frequent “homonym misspellings” (eg: “White House council”). A slip of the dentures could explain “covfefe”. Trump's refusal to give up his insecure iPhone might be because it contains a lot of Speech-to-Text (or other text-assist) software (installed prior to becoming president) that he fears anyone finding out about should he have to ask someone to setup a new phone for him, revealing his secret. On rare occasions, he’ll retweet something written by someone else (and unless it was something tweeted by him or someone he knows well, every single retweet contains a photo or video), but after searching his twitter history going back months (I wanted to go back years, but he posts a dozen tweets a day), I could not find a single reply to a post written by someone else. Instead of replying to tweets he might have read, he sends out a tweet of his own responding to something already reported on TV or remarked on by others.) He doesn’t Reply to tweets insulting him. Instead, he posts his own attack referencing the offending tweet.
His books were all “ghostwritten” for him. His 1987 best-seller “Art of the Deal” was ghostwritten by Tony Schwartz. And John Rothchild, the ghostwriter for his next book, “Surviving at the Top”, noted “different writing styles between Trump’s first two books.” There is no evidence Trump actually sat down and wrote a single page of anything bearing his name.
I recall once reading somewhere that Trump preferred “verbal contracts” over written ones in his business dealings, and “prefers” his White House Briefings done orally. (And recently it was reported, on the few occasions where he is briefed in text, “positive things had to be typed in green and negative things in red.” (Links requested if anyone has them.) Very early on, some anonymous staffers revealed they had to embed Trump’s name into every paragraph of a document just to get him to read it (his illiteracy losing out to his mind-boggling narcissism.)
Before he delivered his Border Holocaust speech the other night, the White House claimed Trump “was writing the speech himself” to explain why no one had seen him all day. But sources later reported that in fact WH aide Stephen Miller had in fact written Trump’s speech for him. So what was Trump doing all that time? Likely memorizing it. The speech was fairly short at less than 10 minutes (9:32) and contained nothing new he hadn’t already repeated a dozen times before.
It does require some brains to get away with hiding your illiteracy for so long, and it is a stigma that would make someone so insecure about themselves as to feel the need to frequently assert how smart they are (eg: “one of the great minds”, “high IQ”, “like a really smart person”, etc.) and denigrating the intelligence of people whom make him feel inferior.
The question of Trump’s literacy was seriously raised over Christmas when General Mattis wrote a scathing rebuke of Trump while handing in his resignation… a rebuke that took Trump three days to react to with his usual toddler-like belligerence, not realizing he had been insulted until after it had been reported on TV.
And just prior to that, Rudy Giuliani described Trump attempting to answer Robert Mueller’s written questions as “a nightmare” and that it “took him about three weeks to do what would normally take two days.”
His unreadable signature looks like a seismograph, containing nothing resembling the letter “T”. And the few examples of handwriting we DO have for him are all in “print” (no script).
He made ridiculing Obama’s use of “teleprompters” a thing, so when he/Trump doesn’t use them, he can attribute it to “being smart enough to not need them.” And he has a visceral hatred of newspapers and reporters… anyone whom might criticize him in print (a de facto “secret code”) that he can’t respond to until someone tells him what was written about him (meaning it was out there for hours, even days, going unchallenged.)
He declared during the 2016 campaign: “I love the poorly educated!” That’s because he identifies with them and knows what it’s like to be made to feel “stupid” by people smarter than him (unintentionally.)
One of the reasons it has been so difficult to produce evidence of direct collusion between Trump himself & Russia is because he doesn’t email (I searched online and could not find a single example of an email “To” or “From” Donald Trump.) No one likely emailed him anything concerning their interaction with Russia because they knew it would never be read, and Trump himself certainly never sent an email to anyone concerning their actions. (If you are looking for good “blackmail” material for Russia to lord over Trump’s head that he fears coming out more than getting caught sleeping with pornstars, this would definitely qualify.) The recent revelation that Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort shared internal poling data with Russian Intelligence is unlikely to lead to an email of Manafort informing Trump of his progress, nor an email of Trump’s revealing his knowledge it was even taking place.
His illiteracy has worked well for him for decades as a corrupt businessman whom made his fortune making legally-questionable shady deals with nothing more than a handshake because it means “no paper trail.” And it will likely make proving he was aware of what was happening with Russia (or ANY shady deal) that much more difficult.
The only good part is that I don’t have to worry about him reading this.
FOLLOW-UP (May 26, 2019): Trump was caught holding a Press Release with handwritten (handwriting is definitely his own) badly-misspelled notes: (see image here.)
FOLLOW-UP (Nov 8, 2019): The new book “A Warning” by “Anonymous” appears to confirm my suspicion (key revelations begin @ 3:22.)