I was preparing dinner, as my wife, my 18-year-old son, Nico, and his developmental therapist sat in the family room. Nico is autistic and has Down syndrome; he communicates beautifully with sounds, signs, tech and actions, but each mode requires a lot of work, and it’s only in recent years that he’s begun to make real gains in verbal speech.
So, as I chopped vegetables and listened to a podcast, they were working on using an app that would say words out loud to prompt Nico’s verbal utterances. Suddenly, my wife called to me, telling me to listen as Nico pressed the screen and made the tablet said, “My dad’s name is David.” I stopped chopping and turned off the podcast. Nico smiled, and prompted by the therapist, verbally said, “Day-ve.” That was good enough for me, but the therapist reminded him to say the final “d,” pointing to it on the screen. Nico looked mischievous as he took a moment to do the full motor planning, his jaw and tongue twitching behind closed lips. Then, he said, “Day-vi-duh.”
As the first month of the Trump administration comes to a close, attacks on disabled people are emerging on all fronts.
I teared up. I had never heard him say my name. I’m tearing up now as I write this.
These kinds of moments don’t just happen. They take work, mostly from my son, but also from family, friends, teachers, therapists, doctors, aides and others. That support system has been forged from a combination of laws and government-funded programs that guarantee my son’s rights, provide him resources and offer him opportunities.
The laws are federal. Much of the funding for the programs are federal. This infrastructure has generally enjoyed broad bipartisan support over the past few decades — until now. When it comes to work, communication, education and health care, not to mention basic human dignity, the Trump administration is ready to abandon kids like my son.
As the first month of the Trump administration comes to a close, attacks on disabled people are emerging on all fronts. The new “Make America Healthy Again” campaign reads as a targeted attack against support for conditions such as autism or mental illness, not to mention chronic diseases of all sorts. As they did during the last Trump regime, Republicans are seeking to gut Medicaid. Looming closures of Social Security Administration offices around the country will make it much harder for recipients of disability insurance and benefits under the program to apply, get approved and contest denials.
Then there is the Education Department. Though the Senate confirmed Trump’s nominee for education secretary, Linda McMahon, by a 51-45 vote Monday, the White House is still attempting to abolish the department by executive order. For decades, federal funding has been absolutely crucial for special education programs. The Office of Civil Rights in the department provides the means for disabled students and their families to demand accountability and compliance with the law. Terminating the department could also accelerate the devolution of public education into state voucher programs for private schools, which are not legally required to accept disabled students. Even if the department survives, there’s no reason to think McMahon is committed to — or even understands — her department’s critical role in protecting access to education.
I always am eager to look at policy and how it impacts people’s lives, but this story about the collapse of a great bipartisan consensus around disability extends beyond policymakers in Washington. Attacks on disabled Americans and the policies we rely on lie at the core of so much of MAGA culture.
By chance, the day before Nico said my name, Trump held a press conference about the horrific collision of an army helicopter and a commercial airliner in Washington that killed all 67 passengers and crew. He opened by talking about disability, saying you need to be a “special genius” in order to be an air traffic controller, but then blamed the Federal Aviation Administration for a targeted disability hiring program that includes “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”
For the record, disabled workers had nothing to do with the crash. Also for the record, many disabled workers are entirely capable of being air traffic controllers. There are no controllers with intellectual disabilities, but plenty of people with other conditions can handle this high stress job as well as anyone else. The FAA, like most federal employers, has worked hard to live up to the promise of the Americans with Disabilities Act and hire more disabled workers. It is, after all, not only federal law, but also a competitive advantage that is good for businesses.
If all this wasn’t enough, when conservatives yell on social media, they increasingly like to use the word “retard.” Trump used it at Joe Biden in the fall before his aides talked him out of it. In early January, Elon Musk tweeted it at a Finnish researcher who had criticized the billionaire. Subsequently, use of the slur tripled on his X platform. Musk now uses it all the time and it’s spreading beyond social media. This particular right-wing assault on a marginalized population is new. In 2012, conservative pundit Ann Coulter referred to President Barack Obama using that same offensive word, and faced backlash that was immediate, bipartisan and swept across the airwaves. When Fred Trump III, the president’s nephew, reached out to Republican leaders during the first Trump administration in order to shore up support for disabled people like his son, he found lots of allies. Normal Republicans want to help. Over the years, Republicans and Democrats have often disagreed about who counts as disabled and the amount of financial support these programs deserve, but they still preserved a basic consensus on the importance of the ADA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and Medicaid. This particular right-wing assault on a marginalized population is new. Those basic guardrails around work, education and health care are now broken. When Fred Trump III approached his uncle in the spring of 2020, the current president said it might be better if Fred’s son — the president’s grandnephew — just died. I believe it. At the FAA briefing the other day, the president talked about people who “suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website. Can you imagine? These are people that are … actually their lives are shortened because of the stress that they have.” That’s false. The lives of people like my son are shortened because they don’t have health care. Because they can’t get jobs. Because they can’t find accessible housing. Because when a wildfire rages, no one communicates the threat in a way they can understand. And all of these threats can be ameliorated because the disability rights movement has — haltingly, with many setbacks and disagreements — forced or convinced politicians and policymakers to support basic human dignity. An insufficient but real enforcement mechanism can be found in nearly every federal agency, often located in civil rights wings. Alas, these are the very things now being gutted by the new administration. It’s easy to miss the human side of policy, legal compliance, the nitty gritty of efficient government. To get caught up in slogans about fraud or waste. That’s what Musk and Trump are counting on right now as they install their vandals throughout the federal government. And yet my son said my name. I see, and hear, the human side every time my son says “Hi, Daddy!” or now even, “My dad’s name is David.”
David M. Perry
David M. Perry is a journalist and historian and the co-author of "Oathbreakers:The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe." His newsletter is Modern Medieval. Follow him on Threads. 
