It's the Literacy

Neither one of them is senile—they both have problems, but one of them is a lot more serious

In the excitement over Biden’s and Trump’s funny speech mistakes, media are way too eager to frame it terms of a debate on who’s too old, when the verbal problems of both are probably things they’ve had since childhood—Biden from his stutter, which sometimes leaves him grasping for a wrong word like a life preserver (picking “Mexico” instead of “Egypt” for a country on a southern border because the US border is more salient in his mind as a source of irritation than Israel’s), while Trump’s is from a severe reading disability, of a more exotic type than dyslexia, which poses a triple threat: it’s kept him as ignorant as he is, because he reads as little as possible, preferring to absorb his information from TV; it leads him into much weirder kinds of mistakes, usually keyed to the sounds of a written word that’s giving him trouble; and his efforts to hide it, while amazingly successful, make him weirder still.

What follows is a piece I wrote about Trump’s disability after the Fourth of July speech of 2019 which may offer some useful background:

The big thing you need to know about what happened in Trump's Fourth of July speech was in an AP story—I found it in The Hollywood Reporter, appropriately enough:

The White House did not release a text of the speech that had been prepared for him so it's not known what he meant to say.

They didn't release the text because if they did we'd all have a clear view of exactly what went wrong, and by extension of exactly what's wrong with the president, something as important, maybe, as the narcissistic personality disorder: his reading disability.

I've mentioned this in other venues before, but I think I've never laid it out here, and I'm really annoyed by everybody laughing at Trump for believing there were airports in the period from 1776 to 1814, which is silly and entirely misses the point.

The reading disability isn't something familiar like dyslexia, where the problem is in decoding the letters into speech sounds; he's good enough at that to make it most of the way through reading a 45-minute text aloud. It's in comprehension, recognizing the meaningfulness of what he's reading, and its name in the business is Specific Reading Comprehension Deficit or S-RCD, defined in the DSM as

Difficulty understanding the meaning of what is read (e.g., may read text accurately but not understand the sequence, relationships, inferences or deeper meanings of what is read).

(For more, here's a good quick primer.)

He literally doesn't know what he's saying when he reads a text out loud unless he does it slowly enough that he can listen to himself, and he can only understand it fragment by fragment; he can't assemble it into a meaning-whole. Moreover, he can't read ahead of himself, guessing an upcoming word on the basis of the context, because he doesn't know what the context is until it's too late and all he can do is try to repair the error on the fly, as in the familiar hilarious cases:

They sacrifice every day for the furniture … and future … of their children

hope is a word … and a world … of proud independent nations

tolerance for human struggling … and human smuggling … and trafficking is not humane

sometimes masking it with a more elaborate riff, as in the time he got stuck on "stranded", initially thinking it read "standard" instead:

What standard … and really, if you think of it, when you talk about the great sailors and the great sailors of the world, we have them … but what stranded sailor doesn’t feel relief when those red racing stripes break the horizon?

In that one, he realized how idiotic it was going to sound (why would he be talking about a "standard sailor"?) before it came out of his mouth, and was able to hide it better. Note, too, the formulaic aspect of the interpolation, an outburst of praise for America under his management keyed to the theme of the sentence he's caught in.

Thursday's address, no doubt assembled in a hurry by Stephen Miller with a copious assist from Wikipedia, was an awful, turgid mess of praise:

The assembled soldiers just joined an excited crowd running down Broadway. They toppled a statue of King George and melted it into bullets for battle. The faraway King would soon learn a timeless lesson about the people of this majestic land: Americans love our freedom and no one will ever take it away from us. [Audience Chants "USA."] That same American spirit that emboldened our founders has kept us strong throughout our history....

America's fearless resolve has inspired heroes who defined our national character -- from George Washington, John Adams, and Betsy Ross, to Douglass -- you know, Fredrick Douglass -- the great Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, Amelia Earhart, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, Jackie Robinson, and, of course, John Glenn....

(the name of Frederick Douglass is never safe, for some reason)

Thank you. Thank you to the Coast Guard. On a cold December morning in 1903, a miracle occurred over the dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, when two bicycle makers from Ohio defied gravity with a 12 horsepower engine, wings made of cotton, and just a few dollars in their pockets....

(the wings were not made of cotton, but covered with "Pride of the West muslin"; also, are they suggesting there's some more normal amount of cash that one brings along for the first manned flight in history?)

A good 38 minutes in, the text finally moved on to the army, and Trump was pretty tired:

In June of 1775, the Continental Congress created a unified army out of the revolutionary forces encamped around Boston and New York, and named after the great George Washington, Commander-in-Chief. The Continental Army suffered the bitter winter of Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware, and seized victory from Cornwallis of Yorktown. Our Army manned the air [inaudible]—it rammed the ramparts. It took over the airports. It did everything it had to do. And at Fort McHenry, under the rockets' red glare, it had nothing but victory.

Miller's text certainly said that the Continental Congress named Washington commander in chief, because that was in fact his title from June 1775 onwards; Trump added "after" because the dense clause structure baffled him, thus creating nonsense he didn't notice himself (if Trump had been commander in chief of the Continental Army, he'd have called it Trump International Army and Casino). And that they "seized victory from Cornwallis at Yorktown", that being where the battle was, not Cornwallis's estate (Trump doesn’t know Yorktown was a battle, because he’s never read even that much of a book, nor does he watch the History Channel the way Chuckles Grassley does).

I'm going to hypothesize that what Miller provided next was "... Our Army manned the ramparts at Fort McHenry, under the rockets' red glare", and Trump (who also doesn't know the words to "The Star-Spangled Banner") was completely flummoxed by this bizarrerie. He has an idea he sees "airports" in there, from the second syllable of “ramparts”, and

• starts off saying "Our Army manned the airports", but realizes that can't be right,

• catches "ramparts" for second try but loses "manned" and borrows the other syllable from "ramparts" instead,

• gives up on the verb for the more Trumpian "took over" on the third try but tumbles into the "airport" manhole after all,

• abandons ship altogether and grasps at a phrase he knows must be true ("did what it had to do"), and

• scrambles back to Miller's text on the usual "and", getting himself in further trouble (the audience now thinks the ramparts/airports must have been in 1776, and 1812 has suddenly arrived), and sticks a triumphal predicate on the top.

These farcical maneuvers make up a kind of QED case: our president can't, in fact, really read, though he can make all the appropriate noises and he can even write wirh some fluency (if not without revealing his lack of education). He can read bits of Page Six, if they mention his name, and the like, but he can't absorb a sequence of any complexity from the printed page (and Miller, who writes like a very bright 15-year-old, studding his copy with alliteration and ornamental repetitions, is always too complex).

And this is important especially since he's unwilling for anybody to know it. Unlike, say, Nelson Rockefeller, whose dyslexia was more or less as well known as Franklin Roosevelt's paralysis and who had a whole set of strategies to enable him to keep very well informed and fluid, all Trump's strategies are aimed at trying to hide in his half-assed way, blaming it on the malign effects of rain on the teleprompter the way an old-fashioned illiterate would say, "I forgot my glasses, could you read it?"

He avoids reading any way he can except in these public situations where he thinks he doesn't need to know what his speech is saying—just boilerplate for him to be "presidential" and impress the media. Old David Frum, who made his career as an author of manipulative ceremonial, gets the purpose of the Independence Day speech exactly right:

Trump’s speech was written by people who did not know what they wanted to say. It was a litany of old glories, a shout-out to heroes carefully balanced by race and sex, but with no conscious theme or message. It narrated old triumphs in war and commerce, but without apparent purpose or direction. First this, then that, now a third thing.

Trump wanted pictures and video of his big day: Trump standing in the place where Martin Luther King Jr. once stood, the podium swathed in flags and bunting, bordered by tanks, adoring audience in front, screeching fighter jets overhead … Strong! Proud! The speech existed only to provide a reason why he needed to stand in one place long enough for five waves of warplanes to cross the sky.

Meanwhile, he depends for his information on his passive reception of Fox News and OANN, and can't learn anything that conflicts with the things he believes he knows. That's why he's so extraordinarily ignorant and unteachable. It's dangerous.