Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Former President of the United States Donald Trump speaking with attendees at a "Chase the Vote" rally in Phoenix, Arizona, June 2024.
One day recently, I got an email from an organization called ADA Watch. It urged me to sign a petition demanding that Donald Trump “apologize to the more than three million Americans who stutter, and to cease mocking people with disabilities.”
This was a reference to a report in The New York Times, which said that, during one of Trump’s rallies, he mocked Joe Biden by stuttering, as the President sometimes does.
I signed the petition, but I didn’t hold out much hope that it would do any good. When it comes to saying and doing stupid things, it seems like Trump just can’t help himself. Of all the stupid things Trump said and did during his first presidential campaign, a poll revealed that the stupid thing voters found to be the most unforgivable was when he mocked a disabled journalist by spazzing out.
And here Trump went and did it again. I’m not the least bit surprised by that. After all, this is the same guy who launched his 2016 presidential campaign with a speech in which he said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best . . . . They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with . . . . They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,”
I find that statement to be far more stupid, ignorant, scary, and unforgivable than any of his mockery of disability. And why should anyone expect a person who would immediately appeal to such crass racism and xenophobia by saying something so stupid and ignorant about Mexicans to be any more enlightened when talking about people with disabilities?
In a way, I’m glad Trump is resorting to taking cheap shots at us. That’s what he does. Whenever he doesn’t know what to say about something or someone, he hurls insults that sound like they were created by a ten-year-old child.
A part of me would feel left out if he didn’t take cheap shots at disabled folks. I mean, he takes them at everyone else. Why not us? Are we not worthy? There’s a certain pride that I feel comes with being the object of his scorn. The more he insults you, the more it shows that he doesn’t think you stand for anything he stands for. And that’s an awfully nice thing to say about someone.
It is probably a good thing (at least in some ways) that Trump is so quick to publicly display the bottomless depths of his stupidity and ignorance when it comes to people with disabilities. He can’t even begin to try to fool anybody by pretending that he knows or cares a thing about us. It shows how stupid and ignorant he can be about so many things, and how stupid and ignorant he thinks voters are. When he does and says stupid and ignorant stuff, which he does quite often, he insults everyone’s intelligence.