| President Trump claims Gov. Gavin Newsom is unfit to be president because he has a "learning disability." It's a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. |
| The centuries-old pot-kettle idiom points out hypocrisy — as when one person accuses another of a flaw that afflicts himself. |
| California's governor has battled dyslexia all his life — very successfully, by any measure. Dyslexia is a learning disability that makes reading and writing difficult. But it doesn't mean a stricken person is unable to learn. He just needs to learn differently, as Newsom has done since he was a teen. |
| Trump apparently isn't dyslexic. But he clearly has some learning disabilities — including stubbornness, narrow-mindedness and intolerance. |
| The president still hasn't learned, for example, that he lost the 2020 election. He persists in the belief — or maybe it's merely another boldface lie — that the election was stolen in a Joe Biden conspiracy. That's a bizarre fantasy. |
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| He also didn't learn from past administrations that a commander in chief should not wage war against Iran without a concrete plan to keep open the Strait of Hormuz so Middle Eastern oil can keep flowing to the world. |
| And he never has learned what most of us were taught by our parents: that you don't berate your friends if you expect to keep them friendly — lashing out, for instance, at allies before and after their balking at sending warships to help protect the vital strait. |
| Moreover, he didn't learn that the nation's founders embedded a checks-and-balances governing system in the Constitution and that Congress has a role in imposing tariffs. |
| When the normally Trump-friendly Supreme Court ruled against his unilateral tariff agenda, the spoiled president did what he usually does: attack, insulting the justices who struck down his edicts. |
| "Fools," "lapdogs" and a "disgrace to our nation," he whined. "It's an embarrassment to their families." |
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| Trump still hasn't learned to shut up and try to be civilized. |
| Not even after shocking everyone by saying of the late Republican Sen. John McCain, a Navy Pilot who spent more than five years as a tortured POW in the Hanoi Hilton: "He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured." |
| Any respect I might have had for the guy vanished in 2015 when the then-candidate for president publicly mocked a New York Times reporter's disability. At a campaign rally, Trump jerked his arms and flailed his hands while making fun of the reporter's palsy-like ailment. |
| So it wasn't a surprise recently when Trump tore into Newsom for his dyslexia four times in one week. |
| Yes, Newsom has his eye on the 2028 presidential election and has been scoring points nationally with Democratic activists by using Trump as a punching bag. But Trump keeps offering himself up as an irresistible target. |
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| Regardless, there's no excuse — even in hard knocks politics — for attacking someone because of his disability. |
| "Gavin Newscum" — Trump's synonym for the governor — "has admitted he has learning disabilities, dyslexia," he told reporters in the Oval Office. "Honestly, I'm all for people with learning disabilities but not for my president." |
| "Everything about him is dumb," Trump added. |
| In a Fox News Radio interview, Trump said that "presidents can't have a learning disability." And on Facebook, Trump wrote: "I don't want the president of the United States to have a cognitive deficiency." |
| A quick Google search could have shown Trump that several presidents have had learning disabilities, including dyslexia. |
| Start with George Washington, who struggled with grammar and spelling. And Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, who had trouble with reading and spelling. |
| Other presidents with learning disabilities: Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. "It's a poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word," Jackson asserted. |
| Scientist Albert Einstein was dyslexic. So were Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison. |
| Dyslexia affects roughly one in five Americans to some degree — more than 40 million people, although relatively few are aware of it, according to researchers. |
| Newsom has spoken openly for years about his struggles with dyslexia. It's difficult for him to read, especially prepared speeches. So he reads and re-reads, underlines and highlights and meticulously takes notes. When a speech must be read off a teleprompter, he practices for hours. |
| In January, the governor began his State of the State address to the Legislature with this ad-lib: |
| "I'm not shy or, you know, embarrassed about my 960 SAT score. But I am a little bit about my inability to read the written [speech] text. And so it's always been something that I have to work through and I'm confronting." |
| In his recently released autobiography, "Young Man in a Hurry," Newsom writes: "My high school grades were all over the place and I scored lousy on the SAT, three hours of dyslexic torture." |
| Early in his political career as a San Francisco supervisor, he writes, "speaking to a crowd was not unlike the fear I felt in third grade reading to my classmates …. So I learned to memorize my talking points and best lines … and wing it from there. |
| "This is how I discovered one of the secret powers of dyslexia. I could read a room with the best of them. I'd walk in and immediately size up the faces, mood and manners. ... I learned that an audience didn't mind occasional hiccups of speech as long as you looked them in the eye." |
| Newsom was twice elected mayor and twice governor. |
| None of this means he should necessarily be elected president. |
| There may be policy and political reasons to consider him unfit — but not because of any learning disability. |
What else you should be reading |
| The must-read: Newsom leads Harris for president among California Democrats, poll finds
The TK: Democrats excluded from USC gubernatorial debate urge rivals to boycott in solidarity
The L.A. Times Special: Rep. Eric Swalwell's private AI company raises money, questions |
| Until next week,
George Skelton |
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