Trump, Neurodiversity and the Midterms: Traits, Guardrails and Better Decisions

What if the guy who mocked a rival for being dyslexic shows a fair few of the traits himself? And what if some of those same traits help explain why his party just took a real hiding in the midterms? I don't usually do politics on here, but this is one has been rattling around in my head all week. It's steamed from the Truth About Dyslexia. Let's get into it. Okay, so first up, a bit of a disclaimer, because I know politics can get people really fired up.

I don't usually get into politics here, but it is one of my passions. And I know it's not really what this original podcast was here for, but I, to be honest with you, I just, I want to talk about it because it's really interesting. I'm a bit of a politics nerd. I sit here over in Auckland, New Zealand, and I, like, I spent hours watching the American midterms. It just interests me like anything. It's kind of like a sport.

It's a bit weird, I know, but hey, you know, we all have our hyperfixations. This is one of mine. And a long time ago now, I did a short episode called Does Donald Trump Have Dyslexia? You know, let's talk traits. Some of you might remember it. I basically laid out my use case, my kind of theory, and when, you know, you can kind of see some of these pieces, right?

How he thinks, how he communicates. There's a mixture of what looks a lot like dyslexia and a bit of ADHD going on. And I thought with everything that's happened this year and the midterms last week, it'd be really interesting to go back and revisit that, look at some of the decision-making through that lens, and see if any of it helps explain what happened. Because some people may relate to Trump who are also neurodiverse, but not even know why they relate to him. So I think it's really important. Just note, I'm not a doctor.

I'm not diagnosing anybody. I've never met the man. This is a dyslexic ADHD guy from New Zealand looking at patterns, because spotting patterns is kind of how our brains work. So just take this as a bit of fun and a bit of a thinking exercise. You decide what you believe, and whichever side you sit on, left, right, I couldn't care less. You know, I reckon there's something in here for you because the traits we're going to talk about, you've probably got some of them too.

You know, I probably know you do as well, like if you're listening to this. So let's keep going. So what actually happened? Quick recap for anyone who's been sensibly avoiding the news. The midterms were on the 3rd of November, and the Democrats took back both the House and the Senate, and they did it pretty comfortably. They picked up Senate seats in places like Texas and Ohio, which a year ago I don't think anyone would have bet on.

There's still a couple of races being counted as I'm recording this, but the overall picture is pretty clear. And when the analysts started digging into why, it kept coming back to the same few things: the war with Iran, the price of petrol, or gas as they call it over there, tariffs, and just the cost of living in general. People felt like things were supposed to get cheaper, and well, they didn't. What I found interesting was that J. D. Vance, his own vice president, posted after the result that the reason we lost is the war, and Trump actually said that was largely true.

But on election night, he'd also posted that if he'd been on the ballot himself, they would have won in a landslide. When I read that, I kind of laughed because I know that move. I've done that move plenty of times. I'll come back to it later because it's a good one. Okay, so let's go back to the original theory for a minute. I'll keep it quick because I don't want to just redo the old episode.

Back then I talked about things like big picture thinking, struggling with written stuff, or just avoiding it altogether, being a strong talker. Well, a strong verbal communicator, I should say, repeating the same words and phrases a lot, and that kind of gut feel creative way of solving problems. And if you listen to how Trump talks, you can kind of see all of that. He talks in images, like build the wall. Whether you love it or hate it, everyone can see that wall in their head. The nicknames he gives people do the same thing.

They're basically little cartoons, and once you've heard one, it's hard to unhear it. And as a marketing guy, I think that's a seriously powerful skill. Most politicians sound like they're reading out a policy document, and he sounds more like a movie trailer. It was also reported a fair bit in his first term that his staff kept his briefings short with maps and pictures because he just wasn't going to read 40 pages. People use that as a dig at him, but when I heard it, I thought, mate, that's half the people listening to this podcast. That's definitely me.

Give me a 40-page document and I'll suddenly find a reason to go and make a coffee. Then there's the repetition. Tremendous, like nobody's ever seen before, many people are saying. A lot of dyslexics I know have their go-to words, and I think it's because when you think in pictures, grabbing the exact right word on the spot is hard work, so you lean on the ones you know will land. And then if you add the ADHD side on top of that, that's where it gets interesting for the midterm. So ADHD, if I keep it simple, is a brain that's always chasing dopamine.

It wants the new thing, the fight, the next headline, and it struggles with the slow, boring, wait-and-see kind of stuff. So what does that look like? Well, posting at all hours of the night, starting a fight with someone and then starting another one before the first one's even finished, making a big announcement and then walking it back, and making calls fast on gut feel, sometimes before the information has even caught up. Let me paint you a picture. So there's this guy, Gary, and Gary runs a jet ski hire business on a lake. Lovely bloke, big personality, everyone in town knows him.

One Monday, Gary's up at about four in the morning, scrolling on his phone, and he gets this idea that all the other jet ski places are somehow ripping him off, and he's going to show them. So he puts all his prices up by 50% and posts it on Facebook at quarter past four, and he calls it the best prices on the lake, which doesn't really make sense, but he says it with so much confidence that you kind of believe him. By Wednesday, the phone's gone quiet. Families are going to the place down the road, and his manager, Sharon, is standing in the shed with a calculator going, Gary, we've had four bookings this week. So Gary puts it on hold for 90 days, just while they sort things out, except he leaves the prices 10% higher than they were, and then he tells everyone the pause was the plan the whole time. The thing is, Gary's not stupid.

I want to be clear on that. He saw the big picture really clearly. In his head, he had this whole movie of the other places going under and him coming out on top, and it felt completely real to him. What he didn't have was the patience for the boring middle bit, like sitting down with a spreadsheet and working out what 50% actually means for a family of five on a Saturday. And yeah, I'll admit I made Gary up to sound a little bit like something else. Back in April last year, Trump announced these huge tariffs on pretty much the whole world, called it Liberation Day, and then about a week later, he paused most of them for 90 days.

It happened enough times that a writer at the Financial Times gave it a nickname, which I won't get into, but it involves tacos. Look, whether tariffs are a good idea or not isn't really my point here. I'm more interested in the way it played out, where you get this clear vision, you go hard and fast, it runs into reality, you pull back, and then you tell yourself a story about how that was always the plan. And if you've got an ADHD brain, I reckon you've done that with something: a business idea, a diet, a renovation. I know I have, more than once. Okay, this next one is the one I really wanted to talk about, and it's cause and effect.

If you heard my episode on the 10 things I wish I'd known before I turned 20, number one on that list was that I suck at cause and effect. And I meant it. For years I'd do something and the result would turn up three or four months later, and I just wouldn't connect the two. Unless the consequence happened right there in front of me, my brain didn't join the dots. It's like the cat on the kitchen floor. If you don't spray it with water right when it happens, it's got no idea what you're upset about.

And I reckon that's a big part of what happened here, because a lot of the decisions that hurt them had a delay built in. Early in the Iran war, back in March, I think it was, Trump got asked about petrol prices going up, and his actual answer was, If they rise, they rise. And then by September he was saying oil prices probably wouldn't come down until after the midterms. Now I want to be fair. Every president deals with stuff they can't control. Wars are messy, and I'm a web guy sitting in Auckland.

I'm definitely not a foreign policy expert. But if you look at it through a neurodiverse lens, the decision gets made in March. People feel it every week at the petrol station for months, and then in November they get to have their say at the ballot box. And that gap is exactly the bit our brains are worst at. The decision feels exciting and right at the time, and then the consequences creep in slowly over months. So by the time they land, it feels like they've come out of nowhere.

I've got another one for you. Tina makes wedding cakes, and I mean big over-the-top ones, seven tiers with little sugar swans on them. Tina's dyslexic, and she doesn't read contracts, like ever. She meets the couple. Gets a good feeling about them and shakes on it, so Tina signs up with a big wedding venue to be their only cake supplier. Felt great, lovely people, easy decision.

But buried on page 11, there's a clause saying she has to supply the cakes at a fixed price for two years. And then, of course, the price of butter goes through the roof. The first month she's fine. The second month it's a bit tight. And by about month eight, she's working 70-hour weeks and losing money on every single swan. And she honestly can't work out why it's all so hard because in her head, it was a great deal.

She can still picture the handshake. Then her accountant finally sits her down and points to page 11, and Tina goes, Well, that's not what they said in the meeting. You know what I mean? What she remembered from that meeting was the truth for her, and the contract was just a bit of paper. Which takes me back to that election night post about how they would have won in a landslide if he'd been on the ballot. If you've heard my episode, Our Pictures Can Lie, you'll probably see where I'm going.

Dyslexic brains build pictures, and once one's built, it can feel just as real as something that actually happened. In that episode, I told the story about the lighter in my bag. I could literally see myself buying it at a petrol station back home, and it turned out it was my mate's lighter. I'd never bought it at all. So when you get a result, you don't like, a visual brain is quick to make up a different version where it went your way. You know, if I'd been there, if they'd just listened to me.

And it's so detailed, you can almost feel it. So after a while, it starts to feel like that's what actually happened. Is that what's going on with him? Honestly, I have no idea. It could just be politics. Every politician spins a loss.

But I definitely recognize it in myself. I've done it after losing a football game, after a client turned down a proposal, and in plenty of arguments with Holly where I'm sure that if she'd just let me explain it properly, she would have agreed with me. I can see that version so clearly, it just isn't the one that happened. There's a bit of rejection sensitivity in there too, which I did a whole episode on. When a loss or some criticism lands hard, rewriting the story is the fastest way to make it stop hurting. It protects you, but it doesn't always help you.

Now, there's one bit I have to talk about because this is where it stopped being a fun thinking exercise for me and actually got me a bit fired up. Earlier this year, Trump went after Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, who'll probably run for president in 2028. Newsom's been open for years about being dyslexic. He said he can't read a speech off a page, so he memorizes them. At a cabinet meeting, Trump said, and this is the actual quote, I think a president should not have learning disabilities. Another time he said, I'm all for people with learning disabilities, but not for my president.

And he called Newsom low IQ and stupid and said he can't read. I'll be honest, when I read that, I felt it in my chest because I remember being 10 in Saudi Arabia, getting my diagnosis and turning to my mum and saying, At least I know I'm not stupid. That was the first thing I thought because that's what every dyslexic kid is scared of deep down. So hearing the most powerful person in the world say a dyslexic shouldn't be president and tie it to being stupid, for me that's way bigger than Newsom. I think about all the kids who heard that on the news or heard their dad say it at the dinner table. And it wasn't just people on one side of politics who reacted to it either.

It was a literacy advocate in Florida who'd voted for Trump three times, and she said it was one of the more ignorant comments she'd ever heard him make. A Republican senator, Bill Cassidy, pointed out that a kid with dyslexia often grows up into a really talented adult. And a neuroscientist at MIT explained again that dyslexia is about the link between language and print, and it's got nothing to do with how smart you are. To be fair to the other side, Newsom's reply wasn't exactly a Hallmark card either. It got pretty nasty both ways. Politics is a bit of a mud fight at the moment.

But what I can't get past is the irony of it all. In his first term, the Trump White House put out proclamations celebrating the contributions of people with dyslexia. Gary Cohn, who was one of his top economic advisers, has talked openly about growing up dyslexic. And if my old theory is even half right, Trump might have some of these traits himself. I'm not saying that to have a go at him. To me, that's actually the sad part.

If any of this does apply to him, he's probably spent his whole life hearing the same thing the rest of us heard, that if reading is hard for you, then you're somehow less. And if you never work through that, the easiest thing to do is point it at somebody else. I've seen that in grown men in business, and to be honest, I saw it in myself in my twenties. You end up having a go at other people for the thing you're most scared is true about you. Okay, I don't want this whole episode to be negative because that's not what this podcast is about, so let's flip it around a bit. Whatever you think of him, Trump's got a lot of traits that neurodiverse people often have as strengths, and I think there's stuff to learn from the good bits as well as the messy bits.

He can read a room. He talks to people in stories instead of numbers, and it connects. He doesn't need notes. He can just riff for an hour. He's resilient too. He lost in 2020 and came back in, what was it, 2024, and love him or hate him, that takes a kind of bounce back most people just don't have.

He's comfortable in chaos and he trusts his gut. A lot of those are classic dyslexic and ADHD strengths. I've got some of them, and I'd guess a lot of you do too. The catch, and this is the bit I want people to take away, is that every one of those strengths has a downside if you don't put some guardrails around it. Trusting your gut is awesome right up until your gut's wrong and there's nobody around you who'll say so. Being good in chaos is great, but some of us end up creating chaos just so we've got something to be good at.

And thinking in pictures is brilliant until the picture in your head starts to feel more real than what's actually going on, like the price of petrol. And I reckon that's kind of what the midterms showed. The stuff that helps you win a campaign, the energy and the fight and the big pictures, isn't always the stuff that gets you through two years of the boring day-to-day. If you've heard my 80 plus 1 episode, you know I think our brains love that 1% of magic and struggle with the 80% of boring. And campaigning is very much the fun 1%. So what do we actually do with all this?

Because I don't want you walking away just thinking about American politics. I want you thinking about your own decisions. So here's a few things you could try this week. Number one is the overnight rule. Any big decision or any message you're writing while you're wound up, especially late at night, waits until the morning. I've got a rule now where anything I write after about nine o'clock while I'm annoyed sits in my drafts, and I'd say nine times out of ten I end up deleting it the next day.

You could call it your own truth social filter. Number two, find yourself a page 11 person. That's someone who reads the boring bits for you. For me, it's sometimes Holly, sometimes someone on my team, and sometimes, to be honest, it's ChatGPT or Claude. I'll throw a contract in and ask it what three things in here are going to come back and bite me in six months. The important part is you've got to actually want to hear the answer, because if everyone around you just tells you you're right, that's how you end up like Gary with four bookings.

Number three is to write down your cause and effect. When you make a big decision, write down what you think is going to happen and set a reminder in your calendar for three months' time. Then when it pops up, have a look at what actually happened. It feels a bit silly, but it's the only thing I've found. That helps my brain link the decision to the result when there's a big gap between them, and one bonus one. If you catch yourself saying, If I'd been there, it would have gone differently, just stop for a second and ask yourself if that's a memory or a movie you've just made up, because most of the time it's a movie.

All right, I'll wrap it up there. I had a lot of fun with this one, and I know it's a bit different from normal, so if you hated it, let me know, and if you loved it, let me know that too. I might do one like this every now and then, because I reckon public figures are a good way to spot these traits. Sometimes it's easier to see them in someone else before you can see them in yourself. And whatever you think about Trump or Newsom or any of them, being dyslexic doesn't make you stupid, and it doesn't stop you being a president or a CEO or a wedding cake maker or whatever you want to be. Your brain just works a bit differently.

Once you understand how it works and put a few guardrails in place, it's a seriously powerful brain to have. If you want more tools for making better decisions with a right brain, come and join us in Right Brain Resetters at rightbrainresetters. com. There's monthly micro courses, live Q and A sessions with me, and a group of people who actually get it. And if you haven't grabbed my book yet, Dyslexia and ADHD Explained from the Inside, it's on Amazon in paperback and on Kindle. If you know someone who'd enjoy this one or someone who needs to hear that dyslexia has nothing to do with how smart you are, send it their way.

Have an epic rest of your day, and I'll be back next week.