6 Times Donald Trump Fueled Rumors He Can't Read

President Donald Trump is many things, but a voracious reader may not be one of them. In fact, word has it he prefers to read as little as possible, so much so that it's long been rumored that Trump can't read. "He didn't process information in any conventional sense," Trump biographer Michael Wolff wrote in "Fire and Fury." "He didn't read. He didn't really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate." Trump's former economic advisor Gary Cohn told Wolff that the president seemed to avoid reading as much as possible.

The rumors about the president's reading level don't seem to be going anywhere, it sure doesn't help that he's drawn attention to said rumors by suggesting one of his opponents is illiterate. During a March 2026 rally, Trump tore into California Governor Gavin Newsom, claiming that, since the governor has dyslexia, he is not fit to run for president in 2028. He also called Newsom's reading level into question. Trump claimed that Newsom's dyslexia makes him "not a smart person," per X. "He's unable to read a speech. Can't read," Trump told the crowd. "I don't want the president of the United States to have a cognitive deficiency." Trump's petty attack on Newsom's "cognitive deficiency" backfired spectacularly, with Newsom clapping back on X, "Too late."

Netizens also didn't hold back, with one pointing out that Trump can hardly read on a good day. "Gavin is dyslexic by the way. Donald is just an illiterate a–hole," an X user penned. And indeed, Trump has done plenty to instill doubt in his ability to read and understand the written word.

When British Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited the White House in February 2025, he delivered a letter from King Charles III inviting Donald Trump for a second state visit. Trump took the letter. There was a moment of awkward silence, and then the president looked at the prime minister and asked, "Am I supposed to read it right now?" Starmer replied, "Yeah, please do" (via the Associated Press). Trump proceeded to open the letter and looked at it silently, presumably reading it. Then he made a quip about checking whether the king had actually signed it. Next, he raved about how the king is "a beautiful man, a wonderful man." Then he handed the letter to Starmer and told him to read the "very important paragraph."

The video of Trump not reading the king's letter out loud quickly went viral on social media, with some netizens even editing commentary and sound effects into the clip. "Yo I thought ppl saying Trump couldn't read was just a joke. Bro is actually illiterate," the X post's caption read. "It explains why he doesn't stick to teleprompters," one X user weighed in. Others speculated that the president might be able to read but actually needs glasses to do so but refuses to wear them, which would be par for the course considering Trump's fragile ego. Another X user thought Starmer had planned the whole thing, commenting, "How much you wanna bet that Kier Starmer knew EXACTLY what he was doing?? Total f**king boss move!"

Time and time again, Donald Trump has gone off script when he's supposed to be reading a speech from a teleprompter. While most of Trump's teleprompter problems seem to be related to technical issues, some suspect he also has a hard time reading what's on the screen entirely. Evidently, he prefers going off script anyway. In March 2024, for example, he told a crowd at an Ohio rally that he was pleased not to be using a teleprompter, presumably due to the wind. "I can't read a word, they're moving around, I don't know what the hell I'm doing up here," he said (via Times News). 

During an October 2024 rally in Las Vegas, Trump not only seemed to stray from whatever was presumably on the teleprompters, but managed to contradict himself in one short sentence. "Unlike us here tonight, we have an intelligent group of people. You have a man that doesn't need teleprompters," he said (via WAAY 31 News). At one point, Trump also seemed to both slur his words and make up new ones. "Kamala [Harris] also launched a war on tip workers and service workers here in Nevada, increasing the so-called tipola," Trump rambled, seemingly referring to his plans to lift taxes on tips.

In November 2017, Trump had another questionable teleprompter moment while delivering a toast in South Korea: "Together, our nations remind the world of the boundless potential of societies that choose freedom over tyranny and who set the free. And we will free, and we will sacrifice, and we will hope, and we will make things beautiful, especially the aspiration of your people" (via New York magazine). Maybe he was reading a word salad verbatim, or maybe he, in classic Trump style, decided to wing it.

Though Karoline Leavitt may insist he's a "well-read" individual, Donald Trump has openly admitted that he doesn't care for spending time poring over long documents. Shortly before officially taking office in January 2017, he spoke to Axios about becoming president, noting that he wasn't thrilled by the idea of reading lengthy briefings. "I like bullets or I like as little as possible," he confessed. "I don't need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you."

Those who have worked with him have confirmed that the president doesn't do well with lengthy documents. In 2018, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told CBS News, "[Trump is] pretty undisciplined, doesn't like to read, doesn't read briefing reports, doesn't like to get into the details of a lot of things." Trump fired back on X, calling Tillerson "dumb as a rock."

2017 reporting from The New York Times indicated that National Security Council members had to overhaul their usual policy papers so as to ensure the president would actually read them. The information had to be littered with graphics so as to keep the president engaged and was restricted to a single page. Reporting from Reuters also touched on the president's refusal to engage with the written word unless he is baited into doing so, noting that, aside from containing briefings to one page littered with graphics, the National Security Council officials apparently also make a point to pepper the text with Trump's name to keep him engaged. "He keeps reading if he's mentioned," a source disclosed.

Reading can be challenging at best if you have a short attention span. Donald Trump has acknowledged that his attention span has its limits, though he certainly doesn't view this in a negative light. In his book "Surviving at the Top," he stated, "My attention span is short." He touched on it again in his tome "Think Like a Billionaire," penning, "Most successful people have very short attention spans." When Time asked about his past comments regarding his attention span in 2015, Trump stated, "Well I mean I have an attention span that's as long as it has to be."

A number of people who have spent an extended amount of time with Trump have remarked on his attention span. "I think he's definitely got attention deficit disorder," Trump biographer Michael D'Antonio told Politico in 2016. "That doesn't mean he isn't really smart — it just means he's not at his best when he's asked to dwell on a topic."

If Trump indeed has trouble staying focused on a topic — especially one that doesn't necessarily interest him — we can only imagine how that might come into play when it's time to go over a particularly long and dry government document. As Michael Jaffe wrote in The Times of Israel in 2016, "Trump's narcissism prevents him from worrying about whether he has a literacy problem. ... If there is a crisis requiring literacy and/or attention abilities that he lacks, we may all find that his tweeting skills are not nearly enough to pull us through."

Something people might not know about Donald Trump is that, despite the fact he gets access to the most classified information that exists in the form of the President's Daily Brief, he apparently prefers not to read it. Instead, aides have to tell him what the PDB says. During his first term, Trump required that the lengthy PDB be trimmed to three pages. For reference, former President Barack Obama's PDB usually consisted of 12 to 14 pages.

Mother Jones, which reviewed the guidance for Trump's PDB in his first term, found that he ended up getting a lot less important information, thanks to the three-page restriction. "These issues about the overall length of the book as well as whether there are going to be conflicting interpretations — that unfortunately sounds like...bowing to the reality of a president with a short attention span and little ability to deal with ambiguities," former senior CIA official Paul Pillar told the outlet in response to the reports.

Trump let slip that his PDB isn't necessarily daily either. "You know, I'm, like, a smart person. I don't have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years," he said in a Fox News interview shortly after taking office in 2017 (via Politico). Given that the PDB contains crucial intelligence that is supposed to help the president make difficult decisions under immense pressure, this didn't bode well. An insider told The Washington Post in February 2018 that Trump rarely even glanced at the PDB, aside from listening to the updates from his staffers. Reading the document, the source said, is not the president's "style of learning."

In a 2017 interview with Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump suggested his job gets in the way of his insatiable reading habit. "I love to read. Actually, I'm looking at a book, I'm reading a book, I'm trying to get started," he said (via Slate). "Every time I do about a half a page, I get a phone call that there's some emergency, this or that."

It's no secret that reading helps enhance your vocabulary, and frankly, Trump's speeches may lead one to wonder how often he actually cracks a book open. For one thing, he tends to use the same words over and over again. The co-author of "The Art of the Deal," Tony Schwartz, once told MSNBC that the president has a "200-word vocabulary," per the Los Angeles Times. He also told The New Yorker that he believes it's been a while since the president last finished a book. "I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life," he said.

Trump also doesn't necessarily understand the words he uses. In 2016, for example, after he was criticized for mocking reporter Serge Kovaleski's disability, Trump offered the following explanation on X: "Clinton made a false ad about me where I was imitating a reporter GROVELING after he changed his story. I would NEVER mock disabled. Shame!" And in 2017, Trump dusted off the word again when he got into a debate with ABC News' David Muir about voter fraud, claiming that the author of a referenced Pew report was "groveling again." Then there's a 2024 study of Trump's vocabulary that was released just in time for that year's election that found he has the vocabulary of an 8-year-old.