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1. This is exactly right and inspires a few thoughts I have on Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Ulysses, literacy, FDR, Eisenhower & presidential reading.
2. Trump is the first post-literate president. Reading is just not his thing. TV is his main medium: it's the prism through which he understands the world. This marks him off from everyone who previously held the office.
3. Part of me is, I confess, annoyed by the performative intellectualism of Buttigieg's list of favorite books. I mean, I would rather have a social democrat who read only trashy novels to a neoliberal who read admittedly great books like Ulysses. But that's not the divide.
4. The real divide, as McLuhan and Postman taught us, is between literacy & post-literacy, between those who can read (for whom the written word is a part of their life) and those whom other media have supplanted reading.
5. People are saying Reagan & Bush Jr. weren't readers, but the evidence doesn't bear that out. Reagan's mostly read right wing media (Human Events, National Review, even Reader's Digest) but he clearly digested it and it formed his worldview.
6. Bush Jr. also, the evidence suggests, dutifully read the popular histories Karl Rove and others gave him. He was still part of the world of literacy in a way that Trump is not.
7. Some presidents have been great readers (TR, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, @dick_nixon), some more casual. But again, it doesn't really matter what they read as the fact that they did read: reading giving them habits of linear, sequential thinking & abstraction which Trump lacks.
8. Neil Postman, a forgotten prophet, is very good on the specific habits of mind that you get from being a reader. 
9. Alot the traits Trump has that some people see as symptoms of mental decline (the limited vocabulary, the non-sequitur and logical muddle, the frequent resort to slurs and crude nick-names) are more accurately seen as signs of post-literacy.
10. This is a good point. Trump not only watches lots of TV. He watches the shittiest TV. No prestige TV for him, with its narrative ambitions and explorations of ambiguity.
11. Anyways, I wrote about Trump & post-literacy a while ago for @newrepublic. I'll add: Trump's post-literarcy might explain the performative literacy of some Democratic candidates: newrepublic.com/article/144940…
