Anderson Cooper Fires Back at President Trump for His Derogatory Remarks About Dyslexia

Anderson Cooper didn’t hold back his comments about President Donald Trump taking a jab at Governor Gavin Newsom’s dyslexia.

Newsom, 58, has been open about his dyslexia and previously said that he gives most of his speeches from memory as opposed to reading them “because of how letters on a page appear to him,” per Entertainment Weekly.

However, Trump, 79, couldn’t refrain from making a dig at the potential presidential candidate in a recent interview, and his comments angered Cooper, 58.

“With so much going on with the war in Iran, President Trump still found time today to insult millions of Americans, both adults and school kids, who experienced or have faced problems reading,” Cooper said in a segment on CNN on Thursday, March 26.

“For the record, I’ve one of them. I had a mild form of dyslexia as a child,” he continued. “Reading did not come easy for me and I still mix up Bs and Ds and Ss and Rs, and I sometimes stutter and stumble on words as you may have noticed.”

The longtime news anchor considered himself “lucky” though because one of his teachers noticed he was having issues reading “in second or third grade.”

“I got help. A lot of kids don’t. If you’re wondering why the president would do this, it’s because he senses political gain out of it,” Cooper added.

“The president shows his own ignorance when he claims that people living with dyslexia are somehow dumb,” Cooper said after showing a clip of the former host of The Apprentice’s remarks. “If the president actually read books or anything on the topic, he would know that.”

Cooper also pointed out that Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief economic advisor in his first term, was revealed to have dyslexia in a press release that was sent out when Cohn was appointed.

“Apparently President Trump didn’t bother to read that, either,” he quipped.

During an interview at the White House on Wednesday, March 25, Trump said that “Gavin Newscum,” the derogatory nickname he uses for Newsom, “took himself out of the running when he says he suffers from mental disability.”

“And a reporter said it was terrible that I talked that way about somebody with mental disability,” the former reality star continued. “I said I had no problem with it, but I don’t want a person with mental disability to be my president.”

This wasn’t the first time Trump has made cutting remarks about people with learning disabilities.

On March 11, Trump said he didn’t “want the president of the United States to have a cognitive deficiency,” during a speech in Hebron, Kentucky.

The following day, he appeared on The Brian Kilmeade Show saying that “[Newsom] admitted he had learning disabilities. Somebody said, ‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’ I said, ‘That’s okay, but not for the president.’”