For those keeping track, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has now had added people with disabilities to his growing list of people he has mocked and insulted. At a recent campaign rally in South Carolina, Donald Trump imitated the flailing, jerky motions of Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter who has a congenital condition that limits his joint movements.
The back story is that Trump used a 2001 Washington Post story by Kovaleski to back up his claims that he had witnessed thousands of Arab-Americans in Jersey City celebrating the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Kovaleski later said that he had never witnessed any large number of people celebrating the destruction.
When Trump was widely criticized for making fun of Kovaleski’s disability, he quickly denied that he knew the journalist personally, which doesn’t ring true to me.
Kovaleski, has a chronic condition called arthrogryposis, and first met Trump in the late 80s and has spoken with him “around a dozen times”, according to Kovaleski yet Trump claimed to have no memory of meeting this reporter in person. From my own experience as a parent of young adult with a physical disability, everyone we have ever met has a very good recall of our son. Let’s face, it: people with physical disabilities stick in people’s memories.
With one out of every five Americans now impacted by some form of disability, Trump’s nasty mocking of a person with a disability cuts across partisan lines and runs counter to overall American values. As reported by JTA, Jay Ruderman, president of the Boston and Israel-based Ruderman Family Foundation said to the New York Times, “It is unacceptable for a child to mock another child’s disability on the playground, never mind a presidential candidate mocking someone’s disability as part of a national political discourse,” Ruderman said.
I can only hope that people with disabilities, along with their families and friends who will vote in the Republican primaries in 2016 will keep this latest Trump insult in mind when it is time for them to cast their ballots.
