Trump Wants the Disabled Out of Sight — and He’s Got the Policy to Do It
Let’s start with what Donald Trump thinks when he sees a wounded veteran.
He thinks about optics. He has said so, in various ways, over many years. He told a gathering of Republican donors in 2018 that parades and ceremonies featuring severely wounded veterans were “not a good look.” He has avoided events where amputees and disfigured service members would be present. He called John McCain — a man who was tortured for five and a half years in a Vietnamese prison camp — “not a war hero” because he was captured. He has reportedly referred to men who died in service as “suckers” and “losers.”
The pattern is not subtle. Donald Trump is uncomfortable around people whose bodies remind him that life can damage you in ways money can’t fix. And when you are uncomfortable around people, and you happen to be the President of the United States, you can do something about it. You can make policy.
The Memo
Last week the Department of Justice published a memo — reportedly driven by Stephen Miller, who the White House has officially denied was involved, which is itself an interesting denial — authorizing states to institutionalize more people with disabilities. Not as a last resort. As an option. A preference, even.
Since the Supreme Court’s 1999 Olmstead decision, states have been legally required to support disabled people in the most integrated setting appropriate to their needs. Community-based care. Home health aides. Living with family. Having a job, friends, autonomy, a life. Olmstead was not a radical ruling. It was the application of basic civil rights principles to disabled Americans. It said: these people belong in the world.
The DOJ memo says: not necessarily.
It says states can now route people with disabilities — including children — into nursing homes, psychiatric hospitals, segregated schools, and sheltered workshops instead of funding the community-based support that keeps them in their own lives. “This is about moving forward from a very shameful part of our history when we locked people with disabilities away from society,” said Alison Barkoff, a health law professor at George Washington University. The Trump administration’s answer to that shameful history is: let’s revisit it.
More than half of all states have already cut home- and community-based services as a result of the Medicaid reductions in the Big Beautiful Bill — the same bill whose advocates promised would protect “the most vulnerable Americans.” Children and people with disabilities are among the biggest losers of that protection. The memo is the legal architecture to formalize what the budget cuts have already begun: get them out of sight, into facilities, away from the public square where their presence might complicate the narrative.
There is a word for a society that decides some lives are not worth integrating. We don’t use it often in American political commentary because it embarrasses us. The word is eugenics. The Bulwark noted there are “uncomfortably eugenicist vibes” in this policy, which authorizes states to institutionalize more Americans. Uncomfortably eugenicist. That is one way to describe it. ABC News
Special Education Handed to RFK Jr.
The administration also announced last week that it is transferring the Education Department’s responsibilities for special education and civil rights enforcement to the Department of Health and Human Services. This matters enormously. The Education Department, for all its flaws, has a legal mandate under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to ensure that every child with a disability receives a free and appropriate public education. HHS does not have that mandate. HHS has RFK Jr.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the man who, last summer, lamented that autistic people would “never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.” He said this about a category of human beings whose range of abilities and experiences is as varied as the general population. He said it as though it were self-evidently true and self-evidently damning.
This is the man who will now oversee the education of children with disabilities. The man who publicly described their futures as worthless is now in charge of ensuring those futures exist.
Shortly after Kennedy’s remarks, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya announced plans to create a government registry of people with autism, compiled from private and government health records without consent. The disability rights community erupted. The plan was eventually walked back. But the instinct was revealing: build a list of the people you consider defective. Governments that build such lists have a history that does not end well for the people on them.
The Veterans They’d Rather Not See
Here is the particular cruelty of this administration’s relationship with disabled veterans: they made them. They sent them. They put the bumper stickers on their trucks and the yellow ribbons on their cars and chanted “support the troops” at every rally. And then the ones who came home in pieces — who came home with missing limbs and traumatic brain injuries and faces that no longer look like the faces in the enlistment photos — those men and women became, for Donald Trump, an inconvenience.
He mocked John McCain’s captivity. He chose not to visit the American military cemetery in France because, he reportedly said, it was “filled with losers.” He reportedly asked aides why wounded veterans were present at an event because it “doesn’t look good for me.” He is a man who received five draft deferments during Vietnam, including one for bone spurs in his heels that did not prevent him from playing golf, tennis, or anything else he wanted to do.
The veterans who came home damaged — physically, psychologically, permanently — built their lives around programs and services that this administration is now gutting. The VA faces budget pressure. The Medicaid cuts fall disproportionately on veterans with disabilities. The DOJ memo that enables institutionalization applies to veterans in psychiatric care as much as anyone else.
You support the troops until they need something. Then you hide them.
Who Should Be Stowed Away
The Bulwark piece that prompted this essay is titled “The Americans Trump Would Rather Not See.” That is a precise description of what is happening. A president who is personally uncomfortable with physical imperfection, who has spent his life surrounding himself with the visually flawless and the physically imposing, is now systematically building a government that removes imperfect bodies from public view.
The disabled child in a segregated facility instead of a neighborhood school. The elderly veteran in a nursing home instead of his own apartment. The autistic adult in a sheltered workshop instead of a job. The wounded soldier at a ceremony someone decided not to attend.
Out of sight. Out of the parade. Off the policy agenda. Into the institution where they won’t complicate the aesthetic of strength and perfection that this administration performs for its base.
Let me say what I actually think.
The man who is institutionalizing the disabled cannot be in a room with a man who lost his legs in a war he spent five deferments avoiding. The man who thinks autistic people will never write a poem has never sat with one long enough to listen. The man who wants to hide America’s most vulnerable citizens in facilities away from their families and communities is the one whose moral character has been institutionalized since birth — locked in a structure so rigid, so defended, so sealed off from anything requiring empathy or sacrifice, that he cannot recognize humanity when it doesn’t look like a magazine cover.
He wants to stow them away.
We say: they belong here.
Every one of them.