From the reports I have seen, Trump reads very little. He insists that memos be about a half-page, never more than one page. This leads me to wonder whether he is learning-disabled. More than lacking the interest or discipline to read, he may not be able to read very well. I have close family members who have these problems. It would certainly account for his small vocabulary, poor spelling, simplistic sentence structure, and repetitiveness. This may be one of the roots of his insecurity, indeed, the biggest and deepest one. Perhaps he has spent his whole life hiding this disability for fear that people will think he is stupid. In turn, this insecurity would explain why he often feels the need to claim that he is a genius (real geniuses don't have to make such claims, as their published work makes their genius obvious), and why he has such a penchant to put down other people as being stupid. To be fair, although I question whether he has an exceptionally high IQ, I doubt whether it is particularly low either. In my view, the people in Trump 's inner circle who have been quoted as calling him an idiot, a moron, et cetera, are off the mark.
People living with disabilities can learn to successfully compensate for them. I myself am a comparatively slow reader, but I have always enjoyed reading, and I compensate by having better retention than most people. I still remember snippets of things I read 50 years ago, whereas watching a video for a second time five years later is almost like watching it for the first time. My disabilities are mild; in any case, each of us acquires and retains information differently.
What I do question about Trump is whether he ever developed successful compensation strategies to overcome what might very well be severe learning disabilities. A 72-year-old man who finds it challenging to read a one-page memo clearly has failed in this regard; indeed, his compensation strategy is a spectacularly self-defeating one: running off at the mouth about how smart he is while doing little if anything to increase his knowledge. He projects the outward appearance of being too arrogant to learn anything, that he already knows everything he needs to know, and that he knows better than everyone else about most anything, which is bad enough. He is also talented at getting millions of people to believe that war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength, which is worse still. However, the worst of all may be that he secretly believes that he cannot learn anything and has long since given up, that he has a deep-seated compulsion to tell the world how great he is in order to conceal the shortcomings which feed his insecurities, a self-destructive feedback loop.
I take it that Bob Woodward entitled his new book "Fear" because the people around Trump live in fear of his irresponsible behavior and recklessness, and therefore the danger he presents to the republic; but the root of the fear is inside Trump himself. As much as he craves the spotlight, he fears the light being shone on his handicaps for all the world to discover, point fingers at, and ridicule: "Look at that poor, mentally-crippled, old man and the silly things he says! Ha ha ha! He's so funny, but isn't it... SAD!"
