Tuesday, November 05, 2024
Thoughts On Election Day, 2024
Friday, October 04, 2024
Understanding Donald Trump Through an Undiagnosed Learning Disability
A woman I know, 98 years old, sharp as a tack, excited about the upcoming election, offered a theory about why Trump is the way he is. She used to work with kids with learning disabilities, and based on her experience, she believes Trump has multiple learning disabilities, most prominently dyslexia. Undiagnosed when he was a child, and combined with a father who had no tolerance for failure, these caused him to become a pathological liar to hide his inadequacy. Thus the bizarre inability to acknowledge he lost the 2020 election.
I had never heard this take on Trump before, and so I searched the internet for similar opinions. A similar view came from Harriet Feinberg, a former teacher, who wrote a piece entitled "Why Trump Can't Learn: An Educated Guess by a Veteran Teacher." She describes dyslexia as "a neurobiological condition that makes it difficult to learn to read and can also affect sentence formation and vocabulary." Trump has long had trouble speaking in full sentences, and on the campaign trail is said to use a 4th grade level vocabulary. According to what she calls her "informed speculation," a "mild to moderate" dyslexia is "foundational to his inability to learn and grow while in office," and also serves "as a way to link disparate troubling elements in his makeup."
Feinberg further elaborates her educated guess,
"Because trying to read was frustrating, as time went on he read as little as possible. Because he experienced humiliation and shame in the early grades when he saw other children acquiring information with ease from books, I believe he came to resent those children who were academically successful, who loved school, and drew the teacher's praise. His own natural curiosity about the world waned."
The humiliation and shame Trump likely experienced in elementary school goes a long way in explaining the narcissistic and vengeful qualities so much on display in his public behavior.
Like my 98 year old acquaintance, Feinberg links an undiagnosed and untreated learning disability to pathological lying:
"How does Trump's difficulty in reading relate to his penchant for uttering falsehoods? I think he began faking when he was six or seven and couldn't keep up with the other children his age who had learned their letters and were starting to read sentences and little stories. He wanted to be "great" so he made things up. Faking got baked into his personality. He couldn't stop now, not for anything."
Imagine someone growing up in such a vice, trapped between an undiagnosed learning disability and his father's high expectations, with no one to turn to for solace or help.
Another view in a similar vein comes from Divergents Magazine, whose mission is to shift us away from the language of disability and towards neurodiversity. In an article entitled "Trump's Likely Struggle, Our Nation's Consequences," the unnamed author, who has "worked with adults with learning disabilities for 30 years," describes Trump's shame and dissembling when asked to read a legal document. The author's diagnosis: "'a hyperactive dyslexic'--a term coined by Paul Orfalea, the founder of Kinko’s, in his autobiography."
Describing this rare combination of hyperactivity and dyslexia, the author says that "either challenge by itself presents high hurdles in education. Taken together, they can be devastating to a child’s ability to attain literacy.""the Dark Ages then when it came to learning disabilities. I can well remember how struggling students were humiliated by teachers in public and the exodus of some students to schools with greater behavioral rigor and lower academic demands. Only in 1977 did a federal law begin regulating education for individuals with learning disabilities.
Having grown up in the 60s and 70s, I remember how humiliation was sometimes used in schools, most memorably by a high school symphony band director who presumably modeled his approach on that of university band directors William Revelle and George Cavender. Though ultimately earning respect and even reverence from his musicians, Revelle acknowledged "I'm intolerable when it comes to perfection. Sometimes I'm even downright mean about it." Of Cavender's admirable pursuit of excellence by less than admirable means, it is said that he "accomplished a lot through intimidation and humiliation." For those who could weather the tactics, these directors offered an inspiring commitment to excellence, but imagine someone with an undiagnosed learning disability trying to survive in such a milieu.
Trump was sent off to the Military Academy, a private boarding school, at age 13. The author's description:
In those earlier years, students with learning problems had few options for compensation. One common one was to become the class clown. Another was to become the class bully. Trump seems to have chosen the latter.
Being exiled from home and from one’s circle of friends is hard for any child. It seems possible that for Trump it caused a narcissistic wound that has driven much of his behavior as an adult: the need to surpass his father, his mistrust of most others, his terrible pride and anger, his drive to be the best in all ways.
That’s all speculation, of course.
A third source suggesting Trump has an undiagnosed learning disability is Trump's niece, Mary Trump, in her 2020 book “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”
There will never be a professional diagnosis. To fill that void, a mix of informed speculation, educated guesses and insider family exposes are all we will ever have as each of us seeks to make sense of Trump's behavior.
What is particularly striking is how our political reality has come to mimic the conditions Feinberg believes to have been at play in Trump's childhood. The Republican Party's refusals to acknowledge human-caused climate change and taxcut-caused deficits play out as a learning disability. The doubling down on falsehood, the reflexive export of blame--these strategies work with the electorate much as they may have worked with an unforgiving father. And when Feinberg speculates that Trump "came to resent those children who were academically successful," it's hard not to think of the Republican Party's cultivation of resentment and its dismissiveness towards academia.
These traits--denial of reality, anti-intellectualism, bold fabrication, a need to stoke resentment of the "Other"--were already deeply embedded in the Republican Party long before Trump came along. The groundwork was laid for him to take existing traits further, and brand the Party in his image.
On this blog, I have viewed Trump through varied lenses, as a suicide bomber, a narcissist, a hypnotist. Now an insightful 98 year old has offered a fourth lens, perhaps even more powerful and foundational than the others. Reminiscent of the apparently fictional story of the Spanish king whose lisp became embedded in the national language, the Republican Party now speaks Trump's language, dutifully parroting his fictions. As the 2024 presidential election approaches, there is currently a 50/50 chance that the nation, too, will succumb. If he gains control of the nation as he did of the Party, for the duration of his reign we will be forced to live within the harsh, polarizing realities of a most unfortunate childhood.