Frmer President Donald Trump speaks during a rally, Saturday, Sept. 28, 2024, in Prairie du Chien, Wis.Charlie Neibergall/AP
Former President Donald Trump has disdain for disabled people. As Fred Trump III, his nephew, revealed this year, the former President said in 2020 that people with complex disabilities “should just die.” Even before that, Trump hatefully mocked a disabled reporter at a rally in 2015, and called the Paralympics “tough to watch” in 2018.
Now, Trump has referred to his opponent in the 2024 presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris, as “mentally disabled” at a Saturday rally—where he also called President Joe Biden “mentally impaired.”
Trump: Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country. pic.twitter.com/v6Yo6uINp5
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 28, 2024
As Maria Town, president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, pointed out in a statement, Trump’s use of disability as an insult is indicative of his ableism.
“To be clear, the insult of Donald Trump’s comment is not the suggestion that Vice President Harris is disabled, but rather, the insinuation that having a disability is synonymous with poor performance as a prospective president,” Town said.
Ableism is also questionable political strategy, given that, as Town notes: “there are more than 38 million eligible voters with disabilities in the United States, who possess a wide variety of beliefs.”
Some allies have tried to come to Trump’s defense, or offer damage control. South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said on CNN’s State of the Union that while Harris “is not crazy…her policies are.” Graham didn’t repudiate Trump’s comments, nor did he acknowledge their bigotry—and he ignored that disabled people have asked people to not use the word “crazy,” a derogatory reference to mental disability, in such contexts.
In a Face the Nation interview, former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who is running for Senate as a Republican, said that Trump’s comments about Harris were “insulting not only to the to the vice president, but to people that actually do have mental disabilities.”
Katy Neas, CEO of The Arc, an organization which supports people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, agrees. “When public figures mock disability, they’re not just attacking 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 devalued.”
Trump’s views on disability may also be linked to his views on eugenics: “The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development,” Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio said in a 2016 Frontline documentary, according to HuffPost. “They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”
Disabled people, generally, are viewed to have “weaker” genes—making them a target of eugenicist policies, both horrifically in the Holocaust, whose architects shared Trump’s views that disabled people should “just die,” and through laws that allow disabled people to continue to be sterilized without their consent to this day.
In an August interview I conducted with, Fred Trump III, the younger Trump said that his uncle demeans “people that he thinks are lesser than him”; notably, many members of the Trump family have never met his disabled son.
Trump has seemingly not yet addressed the backlash: his recent posts on Truth Social are about immigration and attending a football game.
While she did not use the term, VP Harris did laugh and reply “well said” in response to someone calling Trump “mentally retarded” in 2019. She did, however—unlike Trump—apologize.
When my staff played the video from my town hall yesterday, it was upsetting. I didn’t hear the words the man used in that moment, but if I had I would’ve stopped and corrected him. I’m sorry. That word and others like it aren’t acceptable. Ever. https://t.co/mNmo1hyNpW
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) September 7, 2019
In the final weeks before Election Day on November 5, Town said that she hopes “all candidates will treat our community with dignity and respect, instead of using us as a punchline to score cheap political points.”
