08/26/2024
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/08/19/opinion/why-trump-hates-disabled-people/?utm_source=accessinformationnews&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=08262024&utm_term=editorial
Why does Trump hate people with disabilities so much?
To Trump, we’re just a bunch of losers.
By Alex GreenUpdated August 19, 2024, 1:46 p.m.
Supporters cheer for former president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at a campaign rally at Mohegan Sun Arena in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. on Aug. 17.Supporters cheer for former president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at a campaign rally at Mohegan Sun Arena in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. on Aug. 17.JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
Rarely a day passes without a sneering screed from Donald Trump that casts America as a land of stupid, deranged, weak, and ugly people. It’s such a tired litany that only the most absurdly vicious comments make their way into the press anymore. Most recently, it was his remark that the civilian Medal of Freedom was superior to the military’s Medal of Honor.
The Medal of Freedom is “much better,” Trump said last week, than the Medal of Honor, whose recipients, who stepped in front of grenades and ran into burning buildings to save other human beings, and are now, in his words, “in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.”
Trump’s years of comments about wounded and deceased veterans have rightly been denounced as an affront to those who served, but they are also representative of his broader and unrelenting hatred of disabled people, even though a doctor diagnosed him with heel spurs in 1968, which gave him a medical exemption from the Vietnam draft. Trump has mocked physically disabled people, lied about an influx of immigrants being escapees from “mental institutions,” and suggested that his nephew’s disabled child was an example of why disabled people “should just die.”
To some extent, the fact that Trump holds these beliefs is not unusual. He was raised in an era when disability was a source of extreme stigma and more than half a million disabled people were held against their will in institutions. The disappearance of that world began during Trump’s childhood seven decades ago, and the changes that it wrought have clearly been a lifelong source of outrage for him.
It’s easy to see that Trump’s main grievance stems from the rift that began in that era. As with most of his existence, his concerns are brutally cosmetic and his gripe seems to be that government no longer hunts down and removes the vulnerable the way it used to. In that stunted worldview, the presence of disabled people in public is an affront that he cannot abide.
The important question is why Trump has escaped any sustained blowback for the underlying belief connecting so many of his comments that garner media attention as standalone incidents.The clearest answer is that his hatred of disabled people is acceptable to the widest swath of his supporters while the least number of his opponents find it objectionable.
Trump is hardly alone among political figures in espousing beliefs that are cruel and demeaning to disabled people. Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, New York Mayor Eric Adams, and Governor Gavin Newsom of California are just a few who seem to see disabilities as an easy foil for their vain attempts at finding relevance through ignorance.
And Trump’s detractors seem just as prone as anyone to engage in the kind of flippant armchair diagnosis that makes this such a hostile society to disabled people. At every turn they have sought to argue without proof that he is mentally ill rather than simply rambling, cruel, elitist, aging, and unchecked by common decency. To make him evil, they seem to be saying, he must be disabled.
Fully one-quarter of the American public is disabled in some way, from substance abuse disorder to autism, cerebral palsy, mental illness, Down syndrome, physical injury, and more. Many of us live in poverty, face extreme adversity, and have to fight to be seen each day. Many also now represent greatness in terms that the nondisabled cannot reduce to a cute, backhanded phrase like “special needs.”
Billionaires like Alex Karp openly talk about their disabilities. Disabled veterans like Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois serve in the highest offices in the nation. Countless athletes, like Suni Lee, Serena Williams, Aly Raisman, and Naomi Osaka, have won the world’s greatest contests, inspiring generations of future athletes to lean on one another while confronting the day-to-day challenges that disabilities throw their way.
We all benefit from their greatness and the example that it sets. But in Trump’s America, they’re just another bunch of losers.
Alex Green is a writer and disability rights activist.
To Trump, we’re just a bunch of losers.
