Bluesky

That’s why I said he’s functionally illiterate. You can read and write at a basic level and still be considered illiterate if it’s not enough for what society would expect. Literacy is a spectrum; Someone who reads at a first grade level may be able to read a dinner menu, but probably won’t be able to read the newspaper. But as long as they’re not put in a situation where they’ll need to read in front of others, they can scrape by with just that basic level of literacy.

Trump’s tweets are often only at a first or second grade level of writing. His word choice draws from a surprisingly small dictionary, and he typically avoids words that are more than two syllables long. He also continuously disregards even the most basic punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and grammar rules.

Back before reading was really commonplace people could still read shop signs and things, but they couldn't really spell and anything more complicated than Chicken sold for $0.30 was probably beyond them, but that's all the average person needed.

How someone can be functionally illiterate when they were born in the mid 20th century is beyond me.