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.