Ableism and the Trump phenomenon

Abstract

This article argues that Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential campaign was abetted by ableism, both directly, through Trump’s rhetoric, and indirectly, through the ableist culture and infrastructure of the rural, white working-class communities that turned the election for Trump. The article uses Robert McRuer’s account of ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’ to situate Trump’s popularity in relation to the neoliberal policies that have marginalized and stigmatized the white working class, and deploys Lennard Davis’s account of normalcy to explain why Trump’s own bodily difference was widely, and hypocritically, mocked by the left, and also why Trump’s ‘non-normative’ embodiment appealed to his white working-class supporters.

Keywords:

• Ableism
• neoliberalism
• normalcy
• access
• deindustrialization
• Donald Trump

The rural, white working class offered Donald Trump unprecedented support in the 2016 US presidential campaign (Collingwood 2016). Some analysts have pointed to the power of Trump’s racist rhetoric in winning these voters (Matthews 2016; Yglesias 2016). Others have noted the pull of his populist economic promises (Guo 2016; Casselman 2017). Yet Trump also used ableist rhetoric to court rural, working-class whites; his repeated use of metaphors equating bodily difference with weakness and failure played to a fear of disability that is deeply embedded in rural, white working-class culture. This fear has been magnified by the damage to working-class communities wrought by technological change and the neoliberal policies of deregulation, entitlement ‘reform,’ and disinvestment in the welfare state. Trump’s own bodily difference is also important in any understanding of his popularity with rural, working-class whites. His spectacular and even, at times, debilitated-seeming embodiment mirrors the often debilitated state of many rural, white working-class Americans, whose lack of appreciation for the values of thoroughgoing diversity too often primes them to endorse exclusive definitions of ‘normativity’ that do violence to those who are not ‘like’ them.

The work of crip theorist Robert McRuer is essential to understanding the relationship between ableism, neoliberalism, and white working-class communities. His theory of ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’ (McRuer 2006) explains why disability is so often pathologized and why the prospect of bodily difference can seem terrifying in neoliberal environments. According to McRuer (2006, 2), compulsory able-bodiedness elevates ‘normative’ bodily performances and stigmatizes every performance that fails to conform to this standard. For McRuer, compulsory able-bodiedness is enforced by corporations, policy-makers, and citizens, and because neoliberal values dominate government in the United States, those Americans who find themselves in need of assistance – whether economic or bodily, or some combination of the two – are not just stigmatized, but also offered quite limited opportunities for support and care due to the curtailment and/or privatization of government-provided social services.

During the campaign, Trump alluded to the harm done by these neoliberal policies, but his Cabinet choices suggest that his legislative agenda will draw on his arch-capitalist roots. This agenda is liable to be even more toxic than his rhetoric for people with disabilities—and Trump’s rhetoric is toxic. The title of his policy guidebook, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again (Trump 2015), offers the ugliest example of what became a pattern of ableist language over the course of his campaign. The text makes no reference to actual people with disabilities, and offers no explanation as to how the US economic predicament corresponds to authentic crip experience. Instead, throughout, Trump gleefully pathologizes disability by using the title as a metaphor for economic stagnation. For Trump, ‘crippled’ means not being ‘great’ (Trump 2015, ix), not being excellent (2015, xi), and not winning (2015, 1). In Trump’s vision, being ‘crippled’ is equivalent to being ‘a mess’ (2015, 8), getting ‘killed’ (2015, 20), and being weak and submitting (2015, 43). The pattern of Trump’s ableist rhetoric extends to his mockery of the New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, his denigration of the conservative pundit and wheelchair user Charles Krauthammer – Trump called him ‘a “loser” who “just sits there”’ (Mizrahi 2015) – and his routine belittling of his opponents’ mental difference.

But reprehensible as it is, Trump’s ableist rhetoric plainly has purchase. One reason is simple: many in the white working class – and the working class writ large – are deeply fearful of disability. Until recently, life for rural, white, able-bodied Americans was broadly gratifying. The automation of agriculture, the outsourcing of manufacturing, and the neoliberal assault on social services have left many rural Americans unable to find jobs in their communities and debilitated by the great distances they must travel to find employment. Life in rural America is increasingly precarious, yet rural American culture does not have a strong tradition of valuing bodily difference or conceiving of people as having worth beyond their labor-value. While the urban working class has access to a range of (often inadequate) government services, the rural working class often lacks even this limited access. Low population density, limited access to public transportation, and few social service offices make rural communities difficult to navigate for those with disabilities. Yet, at least electorally, rural communities have not generally embraced the services that might make the neoliberal disruptions of the last quarter century more endurable. Part of this is because the culture of rural America remains independent, rooted in family and contemptuous of the costs and diversity of the metropolis, scornful of social investments, the ‘welfare’ that always seems to benefit ‘someone else’ (Williams 2016). Part, too, is due to a powerful conservative media apparatus that is quick to denounce urban entitlements, but seldom, if ever, highlights the government subsidies that benefit its largely rural, white audience. In the face of its own increasing economic and even bodily difference, much of rural America has redoubled its isolation. This is the environment Trump preyed upon with his ableist rhetoric. Rural electoral complicity with the neoliberal assaults on the welfare state has created an environment where disabled working-class voters have few resources to fall back on. It is no wonder that many rural, working-class whites are frightened of disability. The federal government still offers people with disabilities limited financial assistance, $1070 dollars per month for ‘non-blind persons’ and $1800 dollars monthly for ‘blind persons’ (‘Facts and Figures’ 2014), but these sums are so low that many Americans cannot imagine living on them, especially as, in much of the United States, poverty is treated as a moral flaw.

So far, the left has not done a good job persuading rural America that more accessible and inclusive communities will increase its flourishing. Hillary Clinton tried to make this case – she spoke directly to people with disabilities. But Donald Trump eschewed this vision, denouncing racial and disabled minorities, and promising to create rural, white working-class jobs, and trounced Clinton in rural communities. Employment seems to promise the ‘independence’ prized in rural, working-class culture. Conveniently for conservatives, these promises are also a substitute for economically costly investments in the built environment of rural communities: in public transportation, social services, and child care, investments that would make those communities more livable for people with disabilities and those with limited economic means. The rural, white working class embraced Donald Trump, but his policies are liable to make all rural Americans more vulnerable, and especially those with disabilities. His ableist rhetoric, capitalizing on an ableist culture, will increase the structural ableism that already obtains in the United States.

But Trump did more than appeal to the rural, white working class rhetorically. He also connected with them through his embodiment. His bodily difference mirrors that of many rural, white working-class Americans. Lennard Davis’ (1995) account of the ‘hegemony of normalcy’ is essential to understanding both the left’s mockery of Trump’s embodiment and Trump’s own policing of his bodily difference, a tactic that mirrors the guarded and ableist attitudes of many of his supporters. Davis argues that the term ‘normalcy’ arose out of ‘progressive’ colonial and eugenic initiatives to ‘perfect’ populations by eliminating bodily differences, an impulse shared by scholars with ideologies as diverse as Marx and Darwin, the French statistician Adolphe Quetelet – who posited the ‘average man’ (1995, 5) as ‘exemplar of the middle way of life,’ or the normal – and the eugenicist, Sir Francis Galton, who used the notion of the ‘the normal’ in crafting statistical distributions of ‘normal, ‘ideal,’ and ‘deviant,’ which is to say, disabled, bodies (1995, 8). Davis’ account of normalcy resembles McRuer’s ‘compulsory able-bodiedness,’ but while McRuer argues that neoliberal economies reward performances of able-bodiedness, and stigmatize performances that do not conform, Davis is more concerned with how normalcy is policed culturally. In ‘public venues,’ the normal is defended every time the abnormal is shown to be a threat to ‘a notion of progress, of industrialization, and of ideological consolidation of the power of the bourgeoisie’ (Davis 1995, 15). Davis’ analysis is situated in the nineteenth century, during the ‘consolidation’ of the idea of the normal, and yet his claims about the enforcement of normalcy ring true in the contemporary United States, where notions of ‘wellness’ and the medicalization of difference are widespread. Within this culture, Trump’s body does seem different; he has a heavily tanned face, (presumably) dyed orange hair, mincing arm movements, and a face that flushes easily. His nostrils are prone to ‘whistling.’ On one hand, Trump’s insistence that he is perfectly healthy (Hamblin 2016), along with his boasts about his virility (Carpentier 2016), would seem to suggest that he is comfortable with his body, but while Trump insists on his own greatness in spite of his difference, he also denounces and polices bodily difference as weakness in others – notably, Jeb Bush, whom he derided as ‘low energy,’ and Hillary Clinton, whose ‘mental and physical stamina’ he challenged (Stanage 2016). Given Trump’s rhetoric, his policing of normativity is unsurprising, but the ableist mockery of Trump’s bodily difference by much of the left remains startling. Throughout the campaign, memes mocking Trump’s differences circulated widely. Given how often the left attacked Trump for his racist rhetoric, its willingness to traffic in ableism is troubling. It was also destructive to the cause of defeating Trump, because these same memes – and the mockery of Trump for his famous ‘Make America Great Again’ trucker hat, a sartorial choice that does not seem out of place in rural communities – only served to solidify Trump’s appeal to much of his white working-class base. Many white working-class Americans also feel non-normative, either because of economic anxiety or shame or, even more troublingly, because their tolerance of racial prejudice defies the norms of ‘polite’ society. Because conservative, ‘independent’ rural culture offers few narratives that treat non-normativity and difference as values to be welcomed and fostered, Trump’s aggressive claims of his own greatness and denigration of others allow many of his rural, white working-class supporters to assert a new (yet retrograde) form of normativity. This is Trump’s form of normativity, in which everyone who endorses him is great, and everyone who objects to him – or to whom he objects – is worthy of derision, ableist mockery, and even outright violence. Again, Trump’s assertions of his personal greatness could function as affirming of difference if he did not pair that rhetoric with the ableist denigration of bodily difference in others, if his campaign was not premised on ableist rhetoric, and if he did not promise to upend much of the regulatory and social service infrastructure that people with disabilities depend on.

The success of Trump’s toxic rhetoric and various misdirections means that people with disabilities and other minorities will bear the brunt of his policies. While those of us on the left have rightly denounced Trump’s rhetoric and policies, we have not offered a set of policy alternatives that are attractive to rural, working-class communities. So the question for those who oppose Trump in the United States and around the world should be not just ‘How do we constrain Donald Trump’s ableist and racist neoliberalism?,’ but also ‘How do we find common cause with those whose particular mix of suffering, privilege, and isolation has caused them to fear their difference and embrace communities that discourage their thriving?’ In answering these questions, we must find ways to counter the ableist and racist rhetoric that seems likely to continue to be deployed by the Trump administration. We must argue all the more forcefully for the value of bodily difference, for the value of diverse perspectives and experiences, and find ways to relate an inclusive vision to those who have felt for too long that the only way to cope with bodily difference and economic pain is to deny them and denounce others.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.