In a new book, released on Tuesday, Donald Trump’s nephew, Fred C. Trump III, recounts how the former President privately told him that people with certain types of severe disabilities “should just die.” Once said in the Oval Office and later about Fred Trump’s own son.
If true, the remarks are callous and cruel. But they also invoke dangerous ideas – the kind that can lead to systems of belief, like eugenics, that have been responsible the deaths of thousands of people with disabilities – and they point to the daily stigma that makes life for people with disabilities, and their loved ones, more challenging.
I have a disability, and I know first-hand that there is a better way to understand our differences, one that unleashes everyone’s full potential.
Stigma and the World’s Largest Minority
Globally, an estimated 1 billion people have some form of disability. One in eight of our friends, coworkers, family members, and neighbors are part of the world’s largest minority.
But, despite our numbers, the stigma of having a disability is always present. In many countries, people with mental health conditions live in chains and are considered possessed. When armed conflicts occur, people with disabilities are often the first ones left behind, abandoned to die or fend for themselves. And people with disabilities face an increased risk of forced institutionalization, spending their entire lives segregated in grim facilities away from their families and communities, and otherwise lacking access to schools and jobs.
When Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) over three decades ago it found that “historically, society has tended to isolate and segregate individuals with disabilities,” a problem which remains, “serious and pervasive” with discrimination in areas spanning employment, transportation, education, housing, and more. Much of that discrimination comes from mistaken beliefs that people with disabilities are somehow less than human. That we somehow deserve less or are simply objects of charity, deserving of pity, because the way we see, hear, touch, taste, smell, think, behave, or appear is different from the norm.
Reframing Disability
I know that stigma. I was born smaller than a slice of bread. For more than three months, an army of doctors and nurses at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston monitored my incubator to keep my paper-thin skin from peeling away. Every night, my parents counted the tiny heartbeats – each one a promise of what their son might achieve, if only I could grow. If only I could make it home.
I did leave that hospital but with a condition that has a long medical name – retinopathy of prematurity. It means that I am legally blind. As a child, I encountered some special obstacles. While my classmates struggled to color within the lines, I struggled to even see the lines.
For most of my life, I hated having a disability. The accommodations I received in school, like my black-and-white enlarged textbooks or a seat at the front of the room, made me feel forever different and alone. I wanted my books in color and to sit with my friends. During gym class when we played softball, I hit the ball off a tee while the other kids took a pitch. Three times a week, that rubber ball reminded me that my world and my potential had limits.
After college, I worked as a fellow at Human Rights Watch, a nonprofit organization that documents human rights abuses around the world. During my fellowship I spoke with people with disabilities in different countries, from Nepal to the Central African Republic. Our conversations taught me a new way to think about disability.
I learned to treat disability not as a medical condition that limits my potential or as something that requires “fixing,” but as a condition that interacts with attitudes and barriers that are disabling themselves. This “social model” of disability shifts the focus away from an impairment and asks what we can all do to promote inclusion. The social model says that a person using a wheelchair is disabled because the building they are trying to enter lacks ramps or elevators, not because they cannot walk.
Seeing disability in this more empowering light, I now feel it as just one part of my identity that makes me resilient and resourceful. I went on to study at Harvard Law School, serve as a law clerk to a judge in Washington, D.C., and build a life I am proud of and find fulfilling.
The social model can teach all of us, including Donald Trump, about how to understand and embrace disability. It is also a way of understanding the importance of the ADA, as well as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which nearly every country in the world has joined. Article 1 of the disability rights treaty reaffirms the social model, making clear that “persons with disabilities include those who have long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments which in interaction with various barriers may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others.”
The United States is among the handful of countries that has failed to ratify the treaty under four Republican and Democratic administrations and seesawing Republican and Democratic control of the Senate. Still, for a billion people around the world, the treaty reminds us that we are equal, entitled by law to “the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms” and that States must “promote respect” for our “inherent dignity.”
Time to Stop ‘Othering’
Thinking of people with disabilities as not just the “other,” but as unworthy of love and unworthy of life has led to known horrors. During World War II, the Nazis targeted and killed approximately 300,000 people with disabilities through the Aktion T4 program. Two decades earlier, in a case called Buck v. Bell, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that “three generations of imbeciles are enough” to justify the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck, a woman with intellectual disabilities.
Trump’s ideas build on this history. As a presidential candidate in November 2015, he famously mocked journalist Serge Kovaleski, who has a physical disability, in front of a cheering crowd at a campaign rally. He later denied knowing that Kovaleski has a disability, but the incident left a mark. A Bloomberg poll from the time, which ranked the degree to which Trump’s actions bothered potential voters, found that the mocking imitation topped the list.
And now we know that public rally was not the only incident, and that others involved Trump’s privately expressed views.
In 2019, Trump reportedly told General Mark Milley, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that “no one wants to see” wounded soldiers after he met Luis Avila, an Army captain who “completed five combat tours, had lost a leg in an IED attack in Afghanistan and had suffered two heart attacks, two strokes, and brain damage as a result of his injuries,” according to a profile of Milley in The Atlantic.
In a 2018, White House planning meeting on military parades, “Trump asked his staff not to include wounded veterans, on grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. ‘Nobody wants to see that,’ he said,” according to Jeffrey Goldberg’s reporting. Similarly, after a trip to France in 2017, Trump told his chief of staff, retired General John F. Kelly, “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade. This doesn’t look good for me,” according to the book, “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” by Susan Glasser and Peter Baker (see also Kelly’s confirmation to CNN last year).
Trump’s attitude toward people with disabilities even extends to his own family. As Fred Trump recalls in his book, the former president pulled him aside after an Oval Office meeting with disability advocates and said “‘maybe those kinds of people should just die,’ given ‘the shape they’re in, all the expenses.’” The book, entitled, “All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got to Be This Way,” turns to a different episode involving Fred’s son.
A few years after the White House conversation, Trump allegedly told his nephew, whose son has developmental and intellectual disabilities: “I don’t know. He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”
Reflecting on that moment, Fred Trump writes, “Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear Donald say that,” but “It wasn’t far off from what he’d said that day in the Oval Office after our meeting with the advocates. Only that time, it was other people’s children who should die. This time, it was my son.”
We can all learn from this account, for Trump himself is a product of his environment and he is surely not alone in his outlook.
It’s far past time to end such unacceptable stigmas. People with disabilities are not burdens. We have the potential to live rich and fulfilling lives – but first others need to share that belief. Those with the privilege and opportunity to wield power most of all.