Twelve days before Donald Trump took office, Charlie Kirk, media personality and rightwing activist, complained on his eponymous show about the presence of American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters at emergency press briefings for the Los Angeles fires. Another rightwing activist, Christopher Rufo, took his cue on X, calling interpreters “wild human gesticulators” who turned briefings into a “farce”. The rightwing theorist and Origins of Woke author Richard Hanania, quote-tweeting Rufo, declared ASL interpretation an “absurdity”.
Around this time, Elon Musk was skulking around the platform, campaigning to bring back the R-word. Use of the slur tripled on X after his post.
To those with less knowledge of disability history, these attacks might read as gross, but ultimately toothless. Activists, though, quickly sounded the alarm: the incoming administration would be coming for disabled people. “To the deaf community, the fight for accessibility is nothing new,” said Sara Miller, deaf educator and community advocate.
However, Miller said she had seen a burgeoning movement against accessibility from conservatives with large platforms, including during the first Trump administration, when the National Association of the Deaf had to sue to have ASL interpreters during 2020 Covid briefings. “But when looking at the history of the first term of [the Trump] administration, and currently how diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) is being targeted, it’s not hard to see the correlation.”
Manufacturing cultural outrage to justify policy that would have previously been considered too cruel or damaging is a staple of the far-right playbook: most recently, the US has seen the move used to bolster book bans and outlaw Black history and gender-affirming care.
The play-by-play is always the same: social media followers take their marching orders, hurling discontent at the specified targets and regurgitating talking points. Eventually, the ideas become so ubiquitous they are adopted by politicians who use them to engage their base. Finally, the talking point becomes the policy itself, and politicians claim they have a mandate from the people to justify stripping away the rights of the marginalized.
Fast forward to 21 January 2025, when the accessibility page and all ASL content were removed from the White House website. Then, real-life interpreters were removed from the White House and across multiple federal agencies whose accommodations divisions were dismantled under Trump’s anti-DEIA orders.
Alongside “diversity” and “women”, words like “accessibility” and “disability” have also been listed as grounds to flag or reject grant applications at the National Science Foundation, sparking concerns at other federal agencies and research institutions. And last week, the Department of Justice, which is charged with enforcing the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), began to rescind key guidance, justifying the move by suggesting that accessibility is the reason for cost-of-living increases.
Simultaneously, disabled children’s right to education is under fire. On 20 March, Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education. Earlier in March, secretary of education, Linda McMahon, laid off over 1,300 people – nearly half the department – eliminating seven regional offices, large swaths of the department’s office of civil rights, as well as parts of the office of special education and rehabilitative services, though she had previously said those programs wouldn’t be affected. Twenty-one attorneys general filed a suit over the layoffs, arguing they were “illegal and unconstitutional”.
The education department funds early intervention and post-high school transition programs, and organizations like the American Printing House for the Blind and the Special Olympics. It also enforces the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the law that gives disabled kids the right to a “free and appropriate public education”. A child’s needs and services are documented in a legally binding agreement known as an Individualized Education Program, providing services like speech, physical and occupational therapy, and the use of specialized curriculum. Accommodations like closed captions, ASL interpreters, ramps and elevator keys, braille materials, preferential seating, audio books, use of a laptop or notetaker, and movement breaks can also be included.
Without these plans, disabled students may be inside the classroom, but they will not be meaningfully educated. Now the director of the office of special education position is vacant.
Disabled people’s rights in other government spaces are also under fire. The lawsuit Texas v Becerra calls on a judge to declare section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 – which prevents the US government, or any entity that receives federal money, from discriminating on the basis of disability – unconstitutional. If the law is struck down, basic rights and services for disabled people, like seeking treatment at a hospital or Medicaid-accepting doctor’s office, being hired to the federal workforce, entering a government building and more will be at risk.
The canary in the coalmine
Historically, the way a government treats disabled people can be an early indicator of its broader social policy intentions.
For instance, disabled people are the proverbial canary in the coalmine with respect to the effects of global climate change.
“Disabled and older people face significant barriers during these disasters, such as the inability to evacuate … or [access] important information,” said the MacArthur Fellow and Disability Visibility author Alice Wong via email. “As someone who is ventilator dependent, power outages are a concern during storms or wildfires that trigger rolling blackouts. I am privileged enough to have some backup batteries but they would not last more than one to two days. I guffaw when federal and state agencies give advice such as preparing a go bag and stocking extra medications because that is simply out of reach for many disabled people.”
Recent wildfires in Los Angeles provide one such example in the tragic story of Anthony Mitchell and his son, both wheelchair users, who called for help, but were instead left to die.
Leaving disabled people behind is not new to the American political landscape; the US has a history of eradicating the disabled. Eugenics – the pseudoscientific belief that humans should breed for “desirable traits” and suppress the undesirable ones – rose to popularity in the US and globally during the late 19th century.
The first eugenics-based law in the world was passed in the US: Indiana’s 1907 Act to Prevent the Procreation of Confirmed Criminals, Idiots, Imbeciles and Rapists targeted disabled people in state schools and institutions and incarcerated people by mandating sterilization for “criminals, idiots, rapists and imbeciles in state custody”. The Nazis would go on to praise the US’s codified eugenics and racism in their 1934 handbook.
In Germany, the convergence of two mass-disabling events – the Spanish flu pandemic and the first world war – wreaked economic strife, the rationing of food and medicine, and overcrowding in institutions and long-term hospitals.
Calls from the German eugenicists to stamp out what they called “life unworthy of life” began in the 1920s, even before Hitler came to power.
By 1933, the magazine Volk und Rasse was publishing a variety of eugenics propaganda, including a political cartoon featuring images of large moneybags labeled “a slow learner”, “the educable mentally ill”, and “blind or deaf-born schoolchildren” bore the caption: “This illustration depicts the burden of maintaining the socially unfit.”
That same year, a law called for compulsory sterilization of those with “hereditary diseases” including deafness, blindness, schizophrenia, epilepsy, bipolar disorder, chronic alcoholism and a host of other conditions. A 1935 expansion of the law required mandatory abortions on the fetus of a parent with one of the listed conditions. Approximately 400,000 disabled people were sterilized in Germany and annexed territories during this period.
More extensive propaganda campaigns declaring disabled people as “useless eaters” were launched through various media in Germany. The arts, including in literature, documentaries and narrative film, posed a solution: mercy killings. As Mark P Mostert outlines in his 2002 article “Useless Eaters,” one particularly popular 1941 movie, I Accuse, caused a spike in the belief that euthanasia was an act of kindness toward disabled people. In the film, a a man euthanizes his beautiful, disabled wife as an act of love, asking the court: “Would you, if you were a cripple, want to vegetate forever?” The court acquits; the movie’s final scenes declare “love is medicine”.
Support for euthanasia among Germans exploded, writes Mostert, and the first disabled people were euthanized at the behest of their families, who had bought the party line that killing their loved ones would be an act of grace. In 1939, Hitler created an advisory committee to oversee the state’s first official program for the killing of disabled children, whose murders began en masse that year.
The program quickly expanded to encompass multiple killing sites, as well as disabled adults across German territories, through the program Aktion T4. The Nazi gas chambers were perfected using disabled people. There, officials first created the cover story that “patients” were being sent to take a shower, where they were poisoned with carbon monoxide gas and sent to crematoriums. When carbon monoxide proved too slow, the methodology for gassing via cyanide-based Zyklon B was tested and fine-tuned on disabled people.
Protests from Catholic bishops stopped T4’s public programming in 1941, but by then the gassing of prisoners at Chelmno and the Wannsee Conference to establish official policy of mass extermination against Jewish people were only months away; the T4 mandate, too, continued more quietly until 1945. The program is estimated to have killed about 250,000 disabled people.
The US supreme court’s 1927 decision to uphold forcible sterilization in Virginia has never been overturned. It remains legal in at least 31 states and Washington DC to forcibly sterilize a disabled person.
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It is also legal to pay disabled people less than the federal minimum wage for their work: businesses that receive a certification from the Department of Labor to operate as a “sheltered workshop” pay their disabled employees far less than the legal minimum, at an average of $3.34 an hour.
Additionally, many disabled people today don’t have meaningful marriage equality. To calculate social security disability insurance, the government “factors in all facets of your ‘income’ to calculate how much they are willing to give you”, said the writer and journalist Kristen Lopez in an email. “If you get married, they factor in that person’s income and if your partner makes too much you’re threatened with making less money or being denied services at all.”
How ableism backfires
Ableism is a brand of bigotry that carries few consequences in the American mainstream. Often, disabled people must argue that it exists at all.
Additionally, due to the intersectional nature of disability across race, gender, socioeconomic status and every other classification, that a person’s oppression compounds under a white supremacist system is often lost in the discussion.
“I have seen individuals working in DEI spaces who openly reject disability work as being part of their purview,” said Wyatte Hall, an assistant professor of public health services at the University of Rochester. “I have consistently seen other forms of bigotry be taken quite seriously while ableism, and audism in deaf-related contexts, have been allowed to more or less flourish.”
But ableism eventually backfires on everybody.
The Trump administration’s attack on disability rights and the collective shrug by non-disabled people could result in dangerous and far-reaching consequences. If a judge were to declare section 504 unconstitutional, it could set a legal precedent for dismantling other civil rights protections, which are also known as “spending clause statutes”, including the Civil Rights Act.
“There are other spending clause statutes that cover race and sex discrimination. So any attack around spending clause may affect these other statutes down the road,” said Claudia Center, the legal director of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, in an online community briefing in February.
Securing change through activism
There is a long history of skilled, effective activism by disabled people to leverage non-disabled people’s discomfort around disability in the fight for equal rights and legal protections. Judy Heumann and fellow disabled activists first secured the signature of section 504 in 1977 by staging sit-ins across the country. The 26 days in San Francisco’s health education and welfare office remains the longest occupation of a government building in US history.
Members of the grassroots organization Adapt have often used their wheelchairs to create blockades in protest of inaccessible transportation, conditions in nursing homes and other disability-centric causes, forcing security and police officers to contend with the logistics and fears of interacting with disabled bodies.
In the 1988 Deaf President Now protests at Gallaudet University, students took advantage of the misconception of disabled innocence and hot-wired school buses to block university gates, shutting down the school until their demands for self-determination – a deaf university president and majority-deaf board – were met.
“As we’re seeing with the Republicans’ attempt to eliminate section 504, the activism of the 1970s is still needed,” said Lopez, the writer and journalist, referencing the physical and disruptive nature of those historic protests.
Many battles are already being waged in the legal system, with disabled and non-disabled lawyers and organizations like the National Association for the Deaf, ACLU, and Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund working together on legal filings as pushback.
Outside the courtroom, activists are running public awareness campaigns on social media, encouraging people to call their representatives and attorneys general.
“The most practical thing non-disabled people can do is stay informed and recognize the power of their voice,” said Jordan Christian LeVan, a disability advocate and founder of the educational advocacy organization Fighting for My Voice. “In our current climate, the last thing those in power want is for people to understand the impact of their advocacy. Contact your representatives, show up at school board meetings and support disabled-led organizations. Call out policies that harm disabled people. Your voice matters more than you want to believe.”
Both Lopez and LeVan noted the importance of including disability rights in broader coalitions seeking to push back against the current administration. “You shouldn’t have to personally know a disabled person to care about disabled issues,” said Lopez. “Don’t be afraid to ask questions … that’s the start of a necessary dialogue. We need allies!”
“Disabled people were not always marginalized; we were incorporated into society in the ancient past,” said Dr Alexandra F Morris, a lecturer in classical studies at the University of Lincoln who studies disability in ancient Egypt. “We have the means to create and return to a more equitable society if we wish to, but it is our modern-day thinking that sees disability as marginalized … and a burden.”
After the proposed Americans With Disabilities Act stalled in Congress in 1990 (in part due to opposition from evangelical Christian lobbies), the legislation was spurred forward in part by a protest known as the Capitol Crawl. Disabled people abandoned their mobility devices and dragged themselves up the steps of the Capitol building by hand. The ADA was signed into law a few months later.
“If you live long enough, chances are you’ll experience disability yourself,” said LeVan. “While we’ve made huge strides in disability rights over the past few decades – those protections are under attack. If we don’t fight back now, it sets a dangerous precedent for the future.”
