Well, Donald Trump’s inauguration speech was a shit show wasn’t it?
Whilst Trump declared he wanted to be known as “peacemaker and a unifier” his speech of course said otherwise.
In amongst declaring that the Gulf of Mexico would be renamed the Gulf of America, that the US would only recognise two genders, and announcing a Mars plan that almost made Elon Musk jizz himself into a coma, was something equally as sinister that could be easily missed.
Trump doesn’t just hate nonbinary Mexicans, he also wants disabled people dead
Okay he didn’t say that specifically, but he came very close to it. Just a few minutes after announcing that anyone who lost their job in the military because they refused to be vaccinated against Covid would reinstated and back paid, he dealt an unusually subtle blow to disabled people
Right in between declaring he’d take back the Panama Canal and that they’d go to fucking Mars was this:
We will end the chronic disease epidemic and keep our children safe, healthy and disease-free.
Of course there’s something glaringly obvious here, you can’t “end” chronic illness, because the clues in the name – they’re chronic. You can however deny support, make it harder for disabled people to get treatment, and actively work to endanger them.
So how is Trump planning to “end chronic disease”? Well it sure as fuck ain’t through support and funding research. As always, Trump didn’t elaborate on his actual plan or concept of a plan for this. But his previous work and pledges give us a pretty clear picture and either way it’s gonna be a shit old time for disabled people in America, again.
Judge Trump by his record
Trump’s own record of wanting to deny children disability benefits and severely reduce disability benefits speaks for itself. But wait, there’s more.
Project 2025, which Trump denies having anything to do with yet attempted to enact 64% of it’s 2016 policies, has some particularly nasty ideas for people with disabilities and chronic conditions.
The biggest of all is that it wants to put “time limits or lifetime caps” on Medicaid, which would kick low income people off their health insurance after an arbitrary amount of time. This means the poorest disabled people would be forced to skip, delay, or all out stop their potentially life saving treatment.
On top of this it also wants to make it easier for drug companies to boost the prices of medication by repealing the Inflation Reduction Act which caps medication costs and makes vaccinations free for those over 65 and with certain disabilities. This means some medication could rise by $4,000 annually and risk not being able to vaccinate themselves against things such as shingles and the flu.
Thankfully though Trump isn’t operating alone. Surely someone level headed will be in charge of the Medicare and Medicaid.
Oh wait it’s fucking Dr Oz off the telly, the guy who claimed there was arsenic in apple juice.
The real threat to disabled lives
Okay, at least the health secretary isn’t a complete conspiracy theorist. Nah wrong again, it’s Robert F Kennedy Jr, he of brain worms and claiming vaccines caused autism fame. He also believes chronic illness only originated in the 1980s.
In November he unveiled the Make America Healthy Again plan, because of course it’s called that. It’s basically all food is poison, you cant trust medication, and instead we should all be drinking raw milk.
I wish I was exaggerating here.
As well as firing all the actual nutritional scientists from the health agency, he thinks all food is “poison”. He’s however, bizarrely against vegetable oils and thinks we should go back to cooking with saturated animal fats. He also thinks kids shouldn’t be eating grains (for some reason) and that we should all be drinking raw milk, which has been linked to the recent bird flu outbreak.
Big surprise, brain worm guy hates medication
RFK Jr is also – big surprise – massively against taking any types of medication. During campaigning, he pledged to criminalise SSRIs and Adderall. It’s okay! It’s not like these are drugs which many people rely on to live.
He is however a massive believer in alternatives to drugs. On Twitter he said the FDA had waged “war on public health”. He then accused the agency of “aggressive suppression” of anything that “advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma”. This included but is not limited to sunshine (yes really), hydroxychloroquine (which the FDA does regulate and is patented), ivermectin (again regulated and patented), vitamins (yep you guessed it), exercise and psychedelics.
He also of course, thinks you shouldn’t trust the water supply, because – of course he does.
Drugs are bad kids, but not those ones
If hydroxychloroquine sounds familiar to you, that’s because it’s the drug Trump, RFK Jr and many others started touting as a cure to Covid.
What it actually does is prevent malaria and help manage the symptoms of lupus and arthritis. FDA pulled the use of it for Covid due to lack of evidence, but there were also concerns about rich folk buying it in bulk and increasing the price so disabled people who relied on it couldn’t afford it.
If RFK Jr decides to reverse the ruling, whilst stopping companies from hiking up prices, many could be at risk.
His obsession with psychedelics is particularly troubling as there are fears he could push through dangerous drugs whilst limiting those that actually help people with mental health issues. For instance last year the FDA rejected Lykos Therapeutics’ MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD after some of the participants in the trial participants reported feeling suicidal and even attempting suicide.
The next four years will be life threatening for many
While Trump may claim he wants to end chronic disease, there is no way to do this that would not spell the mass murder of disabled people.
That’s why it felt like a punch in the gut when, during the religious section of the inauguration, was the religious section Father Francis Mann, beseeched god to
inspire our new leaders to be champions for the vulnerable and advocates for those whose voices are often silenced.
Because nothing says championing the vulnerable like making it illegal to be nonbinary, mass deportations, and essentially wiping out disabled people.
I wish there was some sort of hopeful message here. But unfortunately it seems that Trump’s second term is going to be even scarier and more dangerous for marginalised people than the last one.
Featured image via the Canary
