Young people won’t, or can’t, read a book. Now democracy is dying. Coincidence?

The notion of Donald Trump — who lived most of his adult life in a gilded penthouse above Fifth Avenue and thinks he invented the word groceries — as the voice for everyday “forgotten Americans” has always felt strained. But in one key sense, the 45th and 47th president was way out in front of the regular folks who elected him.

The man has rarely, if ever, cracked open a book in his life.

“I read passages, I read areas, chapters, I don’t have the time,” Trump replied in 2016 to Megyn Kelly when she posed the classic interview question of asking about the last book he’d read. The then-future POTUS was merely confirming the accounts of those who know the billionaire developer, like his ghostwriter Tony Schwartz, who said he never saw a book in either Trump’s home or office.

Those details come from a highly prescient 2017 essay by the New Republic’s Jeet Heer that placed the functional illiteracy of the man behind the Resolute Desk in a deeper context, noting Trump had reached the political summit with a made-for-television style that captured the ephemeral nature of today’s politics. He quoted the brilliant 20th-century media critic Neil Postman, who warned darkly of “a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment then vanishes again.” Heer’s piece was titled, “The Post-Literate American Presidency.”

But what’s truly frightening is that eight years later, Trump presides over what is rapidly becoming a postliterate America. It’s defined — according to a growing number of college professors — by the unwillingness, and increasing inability, of up-and-coming generations of young citizens to read a book in the age of iPhones. And things are rapidly getting much, much worse.

A viral essay with an anodyne headline — “The Average College Student Today” — from a self-proclaimed professor at a U.S. regional public university, under the pseudonym Hilarius Bookbinder, has rocked online academia with its claim that the typical modern undergraduate student is functionally illiterate. They essentially argue that smartphone-addled young people — echoing their president — might read passages or ideas, but can’t finish an adult book from cover to cover.

“I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever,” Bookbinder, citing 30 years of classroom teaching experience, wrote. “No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read, and most certainly not the attention span to finish.”

Not surprisingly, the college professor also wrote that the rapid decline of reading is producing students who also struggle mightily to write cogent and useful essays about the classwork they didn’t do — or about anything, really. Bookbinder said student assignments come back in two different ways. Some are on the eighth-grade level: ungrammatical, larded with misspellings (“the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration”), and devoid of original thought. Others are bloodlessly cogent — because the student merely plugged the question into an artificial intelligence program like ChatGPT, before presumably racing back to watch 20-second TikTok videos.

These “checked-out, phone-addicted zombies” are tied to chronic absenteeism in class, a fidgety struggle to focus for an entire 50-minute class, and increasing indifference over missed tests or assignments. Bookbinder stresses: “I don’t blame K-12 teachers. This is not an educational system problem, this is a societal problem.”

Indeed. It’s a big one.

Yes, there are still young people who read books, some even voraciously. I know some of them, but there’s no question these are increasingly rare birds. Bookbinder’s much-discussed essay was merely the exclamation point on a conversation that exploded last fall when the Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch wrote that the majority of 33 college professors she’d interviewed agreed that “students no longer arrive at college — even at highly selective, elite colleges — prepared to read books."

Her piece began with a Columbia University literature professor’s jaw-dropping discovery that one of his first-year students at the Ivy League school had never been asked to read an entire book during four years of high school.

It’s important for boomers and Gen X folks — especially college grads who went to school in an era in which you had to read at least a few classic or provocative books in order to get a degree — to both understand how the world has changed but also come to terms with the major implications for American society.

That’s partly because for now, things are only going to get worse. If today’s college kids are too phone-addled to read Pride and Prejudice or 1984, tomorrow’s students could lower the bar again. Last year’s National Assessment of Education Progress found the percentage of eighth-graders with “below basic” reading skills (33%) was the highest in the exam’s 30-year history, and fourth-grade skills are also way down. And this trend was developing before the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted in-person schooling.

The downdraft was also developing before what I’d argue is the adjacent crisis of the surging use of AI, in the classroom and everywhere else. This is a whole other can of worms, but for this moment, let’s just stipulate that the harm caused by an overreliance on computers to solve problems is — at least for young learners — greater than any positives. Even a highly interested party, Microsoft, found recently that generative AI risks are diminishing critical thinking and confidence for knowledge workers.

Which brings us back to the postliterate presidency, whose avatar is busy wrecking the global order with a trade war based on utter junk economics, after he won over 49.8% of an American electorate who lacked the attention span to understand his destructive agenda of tariffs is exactly what he promised in the 2024 campaign.

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Remember, the rapid decline in reading at college, and the risks of producing new voters who lack critical thinking skills, is affecting the 37% or so of Americans who are earning bachelor’s degrees. It’s coming on top of a political crisis that has divided the nation over educational attainment, with Trump’s base strongly overlapping with the 63% of citizens who haven’t completed four years of college.

The American dream of higher education, which soared in the 1950s and ‘60s with low tuition and major government support for scientific research, has devolved into a nation where public trust in our universities is at an all-time low, thanks to the astronomical cost, limited access, and nonstop right-wing attacks on what they call “indoctrination.”

A trillion-dollar education system producing young adults who can’t read a book ought to be a major political crisis, but frankly, neither party wants to address this. Democrats like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro do want to spend more on higher education, but they’ve decided to take the most narrow-minded, careerist focus. Republicans, meanwhile, believe destroying the academy is their path to political domination.

In less than three months, the new Trump regime has gutted spending on scientific research and the humanities, broadly claimed “antisemitism” as a rationale for imposing or threatening massive federal aid cuts to elite universities, and chilled academic freedom with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and canceling student visas for foreigners. This all seems part and parcel with the GOP’s Maoist Cultural Revolution plan for a glorious American future in which the knowledge industry is abandoned for an economy of workers with tiny screwdrivers assembling iPhones.

The main ingredients in the Trump MAGA recipe for winning American elections are a steady stream of lies about everything from election fraud to tariffs, a new media infrastructure that runs from Fox News for seniors to podcasts for young dude-bros that amplifies these falsehoods, and millions of voters unable to see through the baloney. For Republicans who currently control all the levers of our government, college kids ditching books isn’t a crisis, but a case of “mission accomplished.”

No one should pretend there’s any easy answer to this. Since the dawn of the nuclear age, America and the world have plowed ahead with every new technological breakthrough, confident the benefits always outweigh the downsides. We couldn’t put the iPhone or AI genies back into the bottle if we wanted to, but that doesn’t mean we can’t also work as a society to get education back to what it once was.

There’s no reason why educators can’t recalculate the routes for the next generation of U.S. citizens — to begin instilling a love for reading as early as kindergarten, require high schoolers to read books in order to graduate, and severely limit phone use during school hours. But that would require a government that doesn’t quietly celebrate a new generation of worker drones with empty bookshelves.

America’s book-hating strongman ruler is hoping he can stay on his throne for life by creating a citizenry in his own image. In a nation now run by fake national emergencies, we won’t tackle a true crisis of higher education as long as the fish stinks from the head.

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