‘I don’t want learning disabilities for my president’: Trump on Newsom’s dyslexia
President Donald Trump said this week Gov. Gavin Newsom was “low IQ” and unfit to run for higher office because of his dyslexia, which has become a common right-wing attack against the California governor.
“Gavin Newscum has admitted he has learning disabilities,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday, using an insulting nickname for Newsom. “Honestly, I’m all for people with learning disabilities, but not for my president.”
Newsom has been public about his lifelong struggles with reading, which date back to elementary school. He previously wrote a children’s book about his dyslexia and wrote about it at length in his recent memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry.” Some 20% of the U.S. population has dyslexia.
Dyslexia is a condition that effects a person’s ability to process numbers and letters, but it has no impact on a person’s intelligence, according to the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity. Newsom has said he views written text “as a single image, like a Chinese character,” so he memorizes his speeches and avoids using Teleprompters. He has correlated his academic struggles with his business acumen as a hospitality startup executive.
“Early on, my teachers recognized the cruelty in giving me my turn to read aloud to the rest of the class,” Newsom wrote in his memoir. “Once I graduated to middle school, the book report became my nemesis. Nothing made me tighten up in the gut more.”
Newsom, who is in his second and final term as governor, is believed to be considering a run for president in 2028. Last month, his communications director, Izzy Gardon, made headlines for telling a conservative reporter who asked for proof of Newsom’s dyslexia diagnosis to “f--- off.”
Trump and Newsom initially had a cordial relationship, which deteriorated last year after Congress refused to reimburse California for wildfire aid. The two have not spoken since June, according to Newsom, days before Trump sent federal troops to Los Angeles to suppress protests against his administration.
Newsom’s office and his wife, First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom, cast Trump online as a bully with his own cognitive deficiencies.
“The media needs to start reporting on Donald Trump’s mental decline,” Newsom’s office said Monday evening on X. Last week, Newsom called the president a “brain-dead moron.”
Siebel Newsom posted a video on Tuesday calling Trump’s remarks “ignorant and extremely offensive,” and said “several” of the couple’s four children have learning disabilities.
“Learning differences do not determine someone’s potential, but making fun of those with them certainly does,” she said. “Day in and day out, President Trump says things that make him unfit for office...Everything that Donald Trump represents is frankly, beyond disqualifying.”
