In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the issue's role in campaign politics. In the 2016 campaign, a number of posts discussed Trump's bad record on disability issues more generally. As his words and actions have shown, he despises Americans with disabilities. He told his nephew Fred that severely disabled people -- such as Fred's son -- should "just die."
Ashley Kline had made a point to avoid watching the White House briefing about autism. She already had a sense of what President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might say, and how it would make her feel to hear them say it. As the mother of a 5-year-old autistic son, she’d decided: “I wouldn’t let it get to me.”
But after the news conference ended Monday, Kline picked up her phone and scrolled through the breaking news stories. As she stood in her kitchen in Indiana, her attention vacillated between the reality around her and the one on her screen. She started cooking dinner for her family. She saw that the president had told pregnant women they should only take Tylenol if they couldn’t “tough it out.” She helped her 5-year-old, Andrew, and his big brother make birthday cards for their dad. She read that Trump had referred to autism as a “horrible, horrible crisis.”
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To Kline, this kind of rhetoric feels both harmful and ominous. “I definitely fear that if we keep trending along this path where we are buying what these leaders are selling, telling us that autism is horrible and it rips families apart —” Kline pauses. “I don’t want it to get to a point where inclusion is just thrown out the window, and people start insisting that the best thing for autistic children and adults is to be hidden behind walls once again.”
In the not-too-distant past, autistic people got the label of "retarded" or "mentally ill" and ended up in snakepit institutions such as Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. At The Daily Caller a few weeks ago, Reagan Reese interviewed Trump:
REESE: It’s horrible. I want to get to Russia. I want to ask you another question about D.C. crackdown. Would you be open to the government reopening insane asylums for people with serious mental illness?
TRUMP: Yeah I would.
REESE: You would?
TRUMP: Yeah I would.
TRUMP: Well, they used to have them, and you never saw people like we had, you know, they used to have them. And what happened is states like New York and California that had them, New York had a lot of them. They released them all into society because they couldn’t afford it. You know, it’s massively expensive. But we had, they were all over New York. I remember when I was growing up, Creedmoor. They had a place, Creedmoor, they had a lot of them, Bellevue, and they were closed by a certain governor. And I remember when they did, it was a long time ago, and I said they didn’t release these people? And they did. They released them into society, and that’s what you have. It’s a rough, it’s a rough situation.
REESE: How soon –
TRUMP: Why is that a big thing? People are thinking about that?
REESE: Well –
TRUMP: Because, you can’t have these people walking around.
