Right Wing pundit Ann Coulter defended Trump by claiming he wasn’t mocking Kovaleski’s specific disability but was rather “he was just doing an impression of a ‘standard retard'”. This kind of focus also ignores the double standard of lambasting Trump for his ableism but ignoring the ableism used against the Trump campaign.Īpparently, Trump mocking Serge Kovaleski is beyond the pale but the widespread and concerted efforts to label Trump with a hypothetical mental illness were righteous and in no way totally stigmatizing of people with psychiatric disabilities. We are not people to be worked with but to be heroically saved. It’s based in the idea that disabled people are perpetual children who require coddling and protection. It doesn’t do those things because it isn’t actually based in the idea that disabled people are fully human. It does not come with an active call of solidarity for disabled people with demands for greater access and ACA protection or plans on how to help disabled people when Trump implements harmful laws. It does not show Trump’s track record of dealing with disability issues (like that his properties have been sued at least 8 times for ADA violations). It doesn’t acknowledge how gutting the Affordable Care Act will hurt disabled people. However, simply holding up Trump’s mockery of Serge Kovaleski doesn’t help them. He’s threatening the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and disabled people are very worried about what a Trump presidency will mean for them. That is not to say that Trump’s policies are good for disabled people, they’re not. An awareness that he did not extend to the other groups that he targeted and included suggestions on how he might actually hurt them like mass deportations and building a wall. He knew better than to double down on that. Mocking Kovaleski was bad but it wasn’t a suggestion of action against disabled people, even Trump knew enough to deny that he was mocking Kovaleski’s disability. First question, why wasn’t declaring a registry for an entire religious group not big enough of a horror to be the last straw? Second question, why is the mocking of an individual (even if that mockery is grounded in bigotry) worse than the Islamophobia Trump was defending and the actual suggestion of registering Muslims, an action that if taken would hurt millions? He was doing that because he had already called for a registry of Muslims. The mockery of Kovaleski completely overshadowed the fact that Trump was in fact trying to fan the flames of Islamophobia at the time. He was angry that Kovaleski pushed back against Trump’s exaggerated interpretation of an article that Kovaleski had written about reports that Muslims were seen celebrating on 9/11. It is awful & worthy of criticism and commentary but it is far from the worst thing Trump said or did during his campaign and quite frankly the obsession with putting it forward as the quintessential example of how horrible Trump is, is deeply hypocritical.įirst, let’s remember why Trump was mocking Kovaleski in the first place. Trump mocking Kovaleski is undeniably ableist. It infuriates me because it comes not from an understanding of what a Trump presidency will actually mean for disabled people in the United States but from pure paternalism. Things like this make me feel sick and it’s not even the fact that I am repeatedly forced to see that image of Trump (horrific as it is). This incident is considered by many to be Trump’s worst moment of the campaign. This tweet has been retweeted over 100 000 times and I originally can across it when the screenshot was shared on Facebook. Image description: A screenshot of a tweet by Damien Owens including an image of Donald Trump physically mocking disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski with the text “As long as I live, I will never understand how this alone wasn’t the end of it” (link to original tweet) I however genuinely wish that I could stop seeing things like this Particularly because these things could be acted upon and be used to harm the people being targeted. This is entirely understandable considering the bigotry that was the backbone of Trump’s campaign which included suggesting that undocumented Mexican immigrants were rapists and that the US should build a wall on the Mexican border & the suggestion that the US should implement a total shutdown of Muslim immigration into the country.Ĭriticisms of Trump and his use of this sort of rhetoric absolutely should be criticized and protested. People are still trying to piece together how Donald trump won and at the same time voice their horror at his election. More than a week after the 2016 US election many people are still in shock at the result.
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