Janine Jackson interviewed historian David Perry about MAGA and disability for the March 14, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
MSNBC (3/3/25)
Janine Jackson: A fair amount is being written about Linda McMahon’s lack of qualifications to be secretary of education, except the one that matters: an evident willingness to destroy the department she’s charged with leading. Our guest’s piece for MSNBC.com was one of few, so far, to address the impact of the Trump White House, including McMahon’s appointment, on the rights and lives of people with disabilities.
David Perry is a journalist and a historian; he joins us now by phone from Minnesota. Welcome back to CounterSpin, David Perry.
David Perry: It’s so nice to talk to you again.
JJ: McMahon at the DoE is not the only piece of this story, of course, but we might start with that. There’s some confusion, I think, around what the Department of Education does. They don’t really write curricula, but they do have a role in the school experiences of students with disabilities, don’t they?
DP: Yeah. It’s one of the places where the federal level really matters. It matters across the board. It matters that we have a functioning Department of Education that cares about education. But there are specific things it does, when it comes to students with disabilities—like, actually, both of my kids in different ways—particularly around something called a 504 plan. And we don’t need to get into the weeds there, but there’s two different kinds of ways that students with disabilities get services, and one are things we can call special ed, where kids are pulled out or get really modified curricula, but most people just get small accommodations; that really makes a difference.
Conversation (2/13/25)
If there’s a problem, it is the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education, that you appeal to. If there are materials that aren’t accessible—say, for example, you’re blind, and you can’t get materials over audio—you can file an OCR complaint to the Office of Civil Rights and expect to get some kind of response. And certainly under the Obama administration, and even under the first Trump administration, under Betsy DeVos—I’m not a fan of Betsy DeVos, but that office remained functional—and then more recently, all of that was happening. These civil rights offices are not surviving what Trump is doing these first six weeks, and I don’t expect the Ed Department’s to either.
JJ: In your piece for MSNBC, you situate McMahon’s appointment among a number of top-down threats to people with disabilities, and some of it’s old, things people have been pushing for for a while, off and on, but some of it feels kind of new, and some of it is policy, and some of it is, I guess, cultural. What are you seeing?
DP: Yeah, I wrote this piece in MSNBC, and I’ve been thinking about it in some ways since last summer, when I saw this coming. But here’s the version that came out.
AP (3/19/25)
There has been, with incredible amounts of work since the ’50s and ’60s and all the way through to today, the creation of a bipartisan, basic consensus that people with disabilities deserve to be able to work, deserve education, deserve housing that is accessible, deserve healthcare through things like Medicaid.
It has never been a great consensus. It has never been sufficient. The divisions between Democrats and Republicans, or even among Democrats and among Republicans, are vast and important and worth fighting for.
But I do think we achieved that kind of basic consensus, and I do not believe that the current Trump administration supports that consensus, and I have a lot of evidence to talk about it. And we’re going to see more, with the shuttering of Social Security offices, and the things that are coming from Medicaid. And, again, these basic issues around education.
And I think it’s really important for liberals, people like me, to not just say, “Oh, Republicans were always bad on this.” Again, we really disagreed on things, but the example I used is when Fred Trump Jr.—or the third, I can’t always remember their name—the president’s nephew, he has a son who has cerebral palsy and significant needs, went to the first Trump administration for help. He found a lot of people who were ready to help him, who were ready to do important work around access and around medical support.
Guardian (7/24/24)
None of those people are working in the second Trump White House except for Trump, whose famous or infamous response to his nephew is, “Well, wouldn’t it be better if your kid was just dead? It’s too much work. It’s too expensive.” And that’s the attitude we’re seeing now.
And that’s not even getting into what Elon Musk says about disabled people, or RFK, what he’s doing. I mean, we could talk for an hour just about the ways in which anti-disability rhetoric and policy lies at the heart of the second Trump administration.
JJ: It’s so appalling, and so many different appalling things are happening, and yet one can still be surprised to hear people, including Elon Musk, throwing around the r-word. Again, I don’t quite get what is so enjoyable about punching down, but people with disabilities, it seems, are always going to be at the sharp end of that.
DP: It is amazing to me. I’m a historian; I’m pretty cynical about things like progress. I know that things can be cyclical, that things we expect we achieve, we discover that ten, 20 years later, we did not achieve them. We’re seeing that right now with issues of integration, with the attempt to resegregate America racially.
HuffPost (3/14/25)
But I really felt we had gotten somewhere on the r-word, and really basic issues of respect. And all it takes is one billionaire constantly using that as his favorite insult, and now it’s back. It’s back everywhere. I see it all the time on social media. I’m sure it’s being said by kids at school to other kids. That’s something that never happened to my elder son—he’s 18, he’s about to graduate high school—that I’m aware of. I never heard that, but I bet kids following his footsteps are going to be called by the r-word. And I just thought we had beaten that one, and we clearly didn’t.
And I shouldn’t be surprised, as you say, right? I mean, that these things happen. We lose progress. But I’ll tell you that, in my heart, I thought we had beaten at least that slur, and we clearly haven’t.
JJ: I am surprised at my continued capacity to be surprised.
DP: Yeah.
JJ: When we spoke with you some years back, you had just co-written a white paper on extreme use of force by police, and the particular connection to people with disabilities. And part of what we were lamenting then was news media’s tendency to artificially compartmentalize disability issues.
So there were stories that focus on disabled people or on disability, and they can be good or bad or indifferent. They often have a “very special episode” feeling to them. But then, the point was, when the story is wildfires, there’s no thought about what might be the particular impact on people with disabilities. So it’s like spotlight or absence, but not ongoing, integrated consideration.
David Perry: “When you start to dig into the most harmful things the Trump administration is doing, I find disability there, again and again and again.”
DP: The thing about disability, as opposed to other categories of difference—by which I mean race, gender, sexuality—is the ways in which people can move in and out of disability, the ways in which disability, while it is associated with issues like poverty, it does transcend it. It’s everywhere. Every family, everyone who lives long enough, if we’re lucky to live long enough, we will experience disability in our own bodies and minds. It is a different kind of difference, is one of the things that I like to say, lots of people like to say.
And so there is no issue in which disability is not part of it, including, as you say, the weather. And one of the things that was cut from my MSNBC story was when the wildfires were raging through California, conservative influencers—and these are not just people who tweet, but people who get to talk to Trump, right? People who get to talk to Musk, like Chris Rufo—started making fun of ASL, American Sign Language interpretation, when it came to wildfire announcements. Like, who are these people gesticulating? Well, there are deaf people who need to know how to evacuate, right? This is not a joke. This is not wokeness, right? This is trying to save lives, and I really do see it all of a piece that when the planes crashed, that first plane crashed right after Trump took office, the first thing Trump did was blame hiring people with disabilities for the FAA.
I think at the heart of their failures around Covid response is a real fear and dislike for disability and disease, and kind of a eugenic mentality. Just again and again, when you start to look—and I never want to say that disability is the only issue, or the most important issue; one of my kids is disabled, but also trans, right? I’m very aware of other ways in which other people are being attacked for different kinds of identities. But when you start to dig into the most harmful things the Trump administration is doing, I find disability there, again and again and again.
JJ: You’re speaking also to this absence of intersectionality in media, and we talked about this last time, too, because, “Oh, police brutality is a Black problem. It’s not a disabled problem.” People can’t be Black and have a disability, right? Media just can’t grok that, because those are two different sections in the paper, so it’s like they can’t combine them.
Indianapolis Star (3/6/25)
And I want to say, I have seen some coverage, not a tremendous amount, but some coverage, of likely and already occurring impacts of things like budget cuts and agency dysfunction on people with disabilities. A lot of that coverage was local: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Garden City Telegram in Kansas, the Indianapolis Star: local folks, local reporters—who are, I guess, just listening to folks saying, “This is going to close this program. This is going to impact us in this way”—seem to be doing the story as kind of a local government function story.
DP: Nine years has been a long time, and I would say that the disability community has organized around both media outreach, around getting disabled reporters into the media. There are things I just don’t write anymore, because there are too many better people working on them, who are—I mean, I’m also disabled. I’m dyslexic and have mental illness. But my primary relationship to writing about disability hasn’t always come from that.
Things have gotten better in the media about talking about disability. It’s still something that gets missed. It still gets compartmentalized and sidelined. There’s a number of national outlets, like Mother Jones or the Indypendent or 19th News, that have people who’ve come out of the disability community and are full-time journalists. But also I think local organizations have gotten very good at working with local media to tell better stories. And there’s social media organization, starting really with Crip the Vote, was the phrase on Twitter a long time ago, with Alice Wong out of the Bay Area….
JJ: And Andrew Pulrang.
DP: Yeah, that’s right. I just want to say, things have gotten better, and they’ve gotten better, in part, because the disability community and these wonderful leaders have pushed very hard. And it is particularly trying to show these connections across areas, so that when we talk about Medicaid, we also talk about Social Security, and we also talk about the Department of Education, and we see—that’s what I’m trying to do in this piece, is I’m trying to say, “Look, there’s a consistent problem here that manifests with these different policies.”
Man of Steele (1/15/25)
JJ: There is a line in your MSNBC piece, and maybe it was cut back from more, because you do say in response to Trump’s wild, weird claims after the plane crash, that “with mental illness, their lives are shortened because of the stress they have.” And you say, “Well, no, their lives are shortened when they don’t have healthcare, when they can’t get jobs, when they can’t get housing.”
And it does have the line, “because when a wildfire rages, no one communicates the threat in a way they can understand.” But that sentence alone does not convey the energy with which right wingers attacked the very idea of communicating to, in this case, deaf people or hard-of-hearing people in a wildfire. So just to say those things don’t exist, I see why that one sentence doesn’t convey quite the pushback on that.
DP: I mean, I could have written an entire essay, and I think other people did when it happened, on Chris Rufo’s specific attack on ASL, and the way they got picked up by Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk and these other really influential people online, attacking ASL, right, ASL! It should be the least controversial kind of adaptation, right? We’ve had it for a long time. Everyone understands what ASL is, and yet, here we go.
JJ: It’s like pushing the limits to see what we will tolerate.
CBS Mornings (3/3/25)
Finally, I will have a positive note, which was just a little snippet on CBS Mornings on March 3, where they were talking about cuts to DoE, and they had just a fraction of a moment with a woman whose kid has autism, and she was asked what a downsized DoE could mean if federal oversight, as we’re talking about, goes to another agency, which is of course what they’re saying. They’re not just going to shutter DoE, they’re going to shuffle these things off somewhere else. And she said, “My fear is that other schools, instead of helping a child with a disability get the services that they need in the school, they’re going to fix their football field, and it’s going to be OK, because nobody is regulating special education.”
DP: That’s really, really good. Yeah.
JJ: That’s a real good nugget that pulls together the fact of something that might be portrayed as abstract—budget-cutting, efficiency—the way that that actually falls down and affects people’s lives.
DP: We didn’t talk about it, but my framing for this piece was my son, who was 18, saying my name for the first time, which was an amazing moment, and we’ve had lots of these moments, but what I want to say is, they don’t just happen. They’re not just things that magically happen. It takes work and it takes funding and it takes policy and it takes good government and it takes schools, it takes all these different things, and I just don’t see that work being done. And I see where it is being done, the support being stripped away, and it’s terrible to watch.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with David Perry. His piece, “The Trump Administration Is Ready to Abandon Kids Like My Son,” is up at MSNBC.com. Thank you so much, David Perry, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
DP: It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.
Janine Jackson | Radio Free (2025-03-21T21:03:39+00:00) ‘Anti-Disability Rhetoric and Policy Lies at the Heart of the Second Trump Administration’: CounterSpin interview with David Perry on MAGA and disability. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/21/anti-disability-rhetoric-and-policy-lies-at-the-heart-of-the-second-trump-administration-counterspin-interview-with-david-perry-on-maga-and-disability/
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