On March 16, 2026, Donald Trump said that Gavin Newsom should not be president because he has dyslexia—tell that to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. None were disqualified because of their dyslexia.
Although dyslexia literally means difficulty reading, it is more about information processing. Individuals with dyslexia may read slowly or inaccurately and have difficulty sounding out words. They may struggle with spelling or transpose letters (strephosymbolia) and may have difficulty processing or remembering acronyms or spoken sequences. These features can affect reading fluency, the ability to recognize and manipulate words, spelling, and word retrieval. Dyslexia varies widely among individuals and exists in a continuum.
Although George Washington struggled with handwriting, spelling, and grammar, he read widely and maintained a library of 900 books, despite being mostly self-taught. Dyslexia can affect the ability to read out loud, especially in professional settings. In August 1774, Thomas Jefferson skipped a meeting of the Virginia House of Burgesses at which he was to deliver an address indicting the British government. Instead, he sent a draft, which was read and won him a reputation as an effective writer. As president, Jefferson delivered only his first two State-of-the-Union addresses, which were nearly inaudible and incomprehensible. Thereafter, he sent Congress written messages.
Affected individuals may perform better when freed from text-dependent delivery and instead rely on visual, slide-based prompts to support extemporaneous speech. Gavin Newsom said that he never uses a teleprompter. Both Bushes made frequent word malapropisms that occasionally made their remarks sound awkward. Andrew Jackson, a bright child who could read by age five, remained a lifelong poor speller, sometimes spelling the same word differently within a single document. When criticized, he famously quipped, “It is a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word.” Although Woodrow Wilson was a brilliant statesman, he did not know the alphabet until he was nine and did not read fluently until he was eleven. The tragic circumstances of his youth and his genes most likely contributed to his dyslexia, which usually has multifactorial causes.
Dyslexia is a complex condition affecting about 10 percent of children (depending on how the spectrum is defined) and involving more than 50 genes, gene regulators, and environmental factors. Up to 68 percent of identical twins are affected. Many of the genes relate to early brain development. Individuals with more reading difficulty tend to have less coordinated neural processing of reading symbols and sounds, which may have prompted Woodrow Wilson to take up shorthand. Although people with dyslexia, like Wilson, usually face lifelong challenges, high-performing individuals often overcome it with other skills. Its prevalence in high achievers has sparked research on the strengths of these individuals. One hypothesis is that they have better visual-spatial capabilities and nontraditional ways of conceptualizing. They may have more creativity, big-picture thinking, and high-level reasoning skills. Slow reading, paradoxically, may encourage more deliberate engagement with the text, resulting in a deeper comprehension. In this regard, the challenge of dyslexia may seed a higher level of presidential mentation.