former president donald trump I despise disabled people. As his nephew Fred Trump III revealed this year, the former president said that people with multiple disabilities in 2020 “should just die.” Before that, Trump disgustingly mocked a disabled journalist at a rally in 2015 and said the 2018 Paralympic Games were “hard to watch.”
Now, Trump has referred to his 2024 presidential opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as “mentally disabled” at a rally on Saturday. He also called President Joe Biden ‘mentally disabled.’
Trump: Joe Biden has developed a mental disorder. Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And when you think about it, only a mentally challenged person could have allowed something like this to happen to our country. pic.twitter.com/v6Yo6uINp5
— Asyn (@Acyn) September 28, 2024
Maria Town, president of the American Association of People with Disability, said in a statement that Trump’s use of disability as an insult shows his ableism.
“To be clear, the insult to Donald Trump’s comments is not the suggestion that Vice President Harris is disabled, but the suggestion that being disabled is synonymous with poor performance as president-elect,” Towne said.
Ableism is also a questionable political strategy, given that, as Town points out, “there are more than 38 million eligible voters with disabilities in the United States with a variety of beliefs.”
Some allies defended Trump or attempted damage control. South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said on CNN: state of union Harris is “not crazy… but her policies are.” Graham neither denied Trump’s comments nor acknowledged their bigotry. And he ignored the fact that disabled people have asked people to stop using the word “crazy” in that context, a derogatory reference to mental disability.
at face the country In an interview, former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, who is running as a Republican senator, said Trump’s comments about Harris were “an insult not only to the vice president, but to people who actually have mental disabilities.”
Katy Neas, CEO of The Arc, an organization that supports people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, agrees. “When public figures mock disabilities, they are not simply attacking their political opponents,” Neas said in a statement Sunday. “Millions of people with disabilities and their families are hearing that they and their loved ones are being devalued.”
Trump’s views on disability can also be linked to his views on eugenics. “The family supports the racehorse theory of human development,” said Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio. 2016 Frontline According to the documentary HuffPost. “They believe that there are superior people and that combining the genes of a superior woman and a superior man will produce superior offspring.”
Disabled people are generally considered to have “weaker” genes and are therefore targets of eugenics policies. In the Holocaust, architects shared Trump’s view that disabled people “should just die,” and with laws allowing disabled people to die, both were horrific. To this day, people continue to be sterilized without consent.
In an August interview I conducted with Fred Trump III, the younger Trump said his uncle belittles “people he thinks are inferior to him.” In particular, many members of the Trump family have never met his disabled son.
Trump doesn’t appear to have commented on the backlash yet. His recent posts on Truth Social are about immigration and attending soccer games.
Vice President Harris never used the term, but when someone called Trump “mentally retarded” in 2019, she laughed and responded, “Well said.” But unlike Trump, she apologized.
I was upset yesterday when our staff played the video in our city hall. I didn’t hear the words he used at that moment, but if I had, I would have stopped and corrected him. sorry. That statement, or anything like it, is unacceptable. always. https://t.co/mNmo1hyNpW
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) September 7, 2019
In the final weeks before Election Day on November 5, Towne said, “I hope that all candidates will treat our community with dignity and respect instead of using us as a linchpin to score cheap political points.”
