Does Donald Trump Suffer From Dyslexia? It Would Explain A Lot.

This is a hard subject for me to write about because it is so very personal. Donald Trump and myself are only a few weeks different in age, and it wasn’t until a few years ago that I finally understood that the nemeses of my life was a learning disability that I did not even know that I had. You see, back in my school years -- a long time ago – no one ever heard of Dyslexia – my almost total inability to learn how to spell was considered a failing on my part. Since I was clearly above average in most areas of learning, and was clearly not introverted or emotionally disturbed it was simply assumed that my failure to spell correctly was a failure to “try hard enough”. I was “lazy”, I was “rebellious”, I was “not paying attention”, etc., etc.

This had a profound effect on me personally, and emotionally, and it forced me to pursue work in the trades rather than in some form of academic employment. I simply could not hold a job that required me to “write” anything, since doing so would be nearly unreadable, and since our society places a HUGE value on properly written documents I was simply unable to compete. And since using the dictionary to “properly spell” words requires that you at least get close to the right spelling, doing so for me was simply not an option. As a side note here, I did learn how to use the thesaurus and that was a god-sent blessing. By the way, in this paragraph alone I have had to correct several dozen words – including “Thesaurus” – which I could not get close enough for spell check to even find, and had to pull up my computer dictionary which has a thesaurus function, and hence the word, which I then copied.

So, you might be asking, what does any of this have to do with Donald Trump? Hang on, I will get there in a moment, but first let me point out something else about folks who suffer from Dyslexia – and according to Wikipedia there are hundreds of very, very successful people who have this problem, and there is even a list of them. But I want to give a quick example of two well know folks who have this malady.

The stigma surrounding dyslexia is just beginning to be understood.[125] As awareness increases, it is informative to observe the long list of notable people who struggled with dyslexia but ended up with successful careers, among them Whoopi Goldberg, who said:

When I was a kid they didn’t call it dyslexia. They called it you know, you were slow, or you were retarded, or whatever. What you can never change is the effect that the words ‘dumb’ and ‘stupid’ have on young people. I knew I wasn’t stupid, and I knew I wasn’t dumb.[126]

Their success was not without struggle. Henry Winkler said:

You want so badly to be able to do it and you can't. And no matter how hard you try, it's not working...I would study my words. I would know them cold. I would know them backwards and forwards. I would go to class. I would pray that I had retained them. Then I would get the test and spend a lot of time thinking about where the hell those words went. I knew them. They must have fallen out of my head...I didn't have the slightest idea of how to spell the words that I knew a block and a half away in my apartment the night before.[127]

I especially identify with Henry Winkler’s statement – God is my witness – I experienced exactly that same thing.

Now to the point of this discussion, this malady affects those of us who have it in a deeply personal way that is not easy to understand for those who do not suffer from it (which according to Wikipedia is over 90% of the population – in other words, the vast majority of people), and that can, and does, affect how we relate to the world around us. We grow up, live our lives, and often never overcome the sense of “not measuring up”, the sense that we are not quite up to snuff, that we have to prove ourselves – we have to make sure that other people don’t think we are “stupid” or “lazy” or unable to process life’s issues properly. In other words, we feel a deep-seated need to “achieve” things, and we struggle constantly with issues of self-esteem.

Well, I can hear you saying, that surly isn’t Donald Trump – the man is close to being a full-blown narcissist. I beg to differ with you on that point. I think that Donald Trump suffers a terrible sense of insecurity, and that he NEEDS to have constant validation of his success, worth, value, etc. He often refers to others as “low energy people”, and he does so as a means of letting you know that he is not “low energy”. Why would you need to know that? You don’t, but he NEEDS you to know that because inside of him he is scared that he is not measuring up. This is also why – in my opinion anyway – he has this unappealing tendency to give demeaning nicknames to those who oppose him, and why he is prone to dismiss challenges to his authority with sarcastic terminology.

In short, he exhibits traits that suggest a man who is deeply insecure.

Does this make him a bad leader? No, of course not, nor is it even an issue unless it gets out of control. Which brings up the real problem here – it seems to me (an others as well) that we are seeing a shift in attitude from this man – a shift from “what is good for the country” to “what is needed for Donald Trump”.

I will leave you with this very well stated paragraph from a posting by Reader Charles this morning:

Why is Trump RE-SELLING the same stuff 6 + years later, to the same desperate Americans, supporting the sales pitch with how great I WAS, while inviting his dwindling audience to buy more HOPIUM processed by a man that ABANDONED the People’s office of President at the first opportunity to actually clean up well exposed corruption, when the evidence of the fraudulent 2020 election was in open view?