Donald Trump was arguably the most ableist president in this country’s history. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that last week Donald Trump Jr. posted a screenshot on X about the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) seeking to hire people with “severe intellectual” disabilities. “There is no level of depravity the elites will not go to to force their agenda upon you,” Trump Jr. wrote, further claiming that “[t]his stuff will get people killed and they couldn’t care less!”
Donald Trump was arguably the most ableist president. It’s not surprising, then, that Donald Trump Jr. is a chip off the old block.
In a story about the FAA, which has an initiative to hire people with a range of disabilities, Fox News saw fit to mention a door plug of a Boeing 737 Max 9 blowing out, suggesting with that juxtaposition that there’s a relationship between the initiative and danger to passengers.
But as the fact-checking site Snopes pointed out, that FAA initiative — which says the agency is open to filling some positions with people whose disabilities include “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism” — has been on the FAA’s website at least since 2013.
That means the initiative existed the entire time that Trump was president, but apparently without a single negative tweet about it from Trump Jr. But, of course, the FAA’s policy not being new is not the only reason the conservative attack is wrong. It’s just as absurd to suggest that the policy is somehow connected to the failure of a door plug that, The Wall Street Journal reported, was manufactured in Malaysia.
Trump Jr. wasn’t the only figure from the right fearmongering over the FAA initiative and treating it as if it were new. People who should be sensitive to discrimination against disabled people — such as Elon Musk, who’s autistic, and former vice presidential candidate…
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