When it comes to people with disabilities, neither the squatter currently occupying the White House nor his primary flunky, Elon Musk, seem to have a clue.
The squatter has a well-documented history of saying and doing things that equate disability with incompetence. During his first presidential campaign, Trump mocked a disabled reporter by doing an over-the-top spaz impression. During his 2024 campaign, he described both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Joe Biden as “mentally impaired,” adding that, “If you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country.”
The day after moving back into the White House in January, the squatter issued an executive order that reeked of bigotry against disabled people. It was titled “Keeping Americans Safe in Aviation,” and it ordered the Secretary of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administrator to cease diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) recruitment initiatives, which it claims are discriminatory toward “ hard-working Americans who want to serve in the [Federal Aviation Administration] but are unable to do so, as they lack a requisite disability or skin color.”
Meanwhile, Musk has put his vast disability ignorance on full display by repeatedly calling people who make him mad “retards.” On X, where Musk has nearly 220 million followers, he bats around the r-word like a beach ball: In one week alone last month, at least three of his posts contained the r-word. In one post, Musk posted a meme of a man in the mountains blowing an Alpine horn and it says “The woke radical left are reeeeeeeeeeeeeeee tarded.” Musk himself acknowledged how many times he has used the r-word when he posted in response to a Yale history professor’s criticism of the Trump Administration, “I’m tempted to call this guy a retard, but I won’t because I’ve used that word too many times.”
“Right now, the right wants a word that stings, and the r-word does the trick,” journalist Justin Kirland wrote in The Guardian earlier this month. “Its proponents cling to it because of its taboo nature, lauding it as a victory over censorship by the woke mob.”
In 2010, Congress passed a law to replace the phrase “mental retardation” with “intellectual disability” in federal laws. The bill was named after Rosa Marcellino, whose mother started an anti-r-word awareness campaign a year prior because of how it had become a hurtful slur to her daughter and others with disabilities similar to hers. That’s how long most people have known that using the r-word is unacceptable.
Part of the problem with someone as powerful as Musk using a slur on X is the reverberations it causes online. Researchers at Montclair State University found that the use of the r-word on X tripled after Musk used the word in a January post. The slur’s resurgence has some disabled folks worried—not just about the use of the word, but about the hostile culture that accompanies it, and the political climate that seeks to curtail their rights.
“I see the rise of the r-word as a gauge for how far society is willing to let people like Musk and Trump go,” Kirkland wrote. “And while I believe that in most reasonable environments, it’s still very much taboo to say the word aloud, the fact that it’s being said by some of the most powerful people in the world, with no recourse, says enough.”
So if you ever see Elon Musk lurking in the bushes of a playground during recess, I wouldn’t be too alarmed. I don’t think he’s a pedophile. He’s probably just eavesdropping, trying to pick up some new insults.