On Air Force One last night, Trump was asked by reporters about recent calls from Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to release his MRI results. This came after the President took to Truth Social on Thanksgiving night and used a slur widely regarded as derogatory towards people with intellectual disabilities to describe the Governor.
When he was asked about the exchange on NBC’s Meet the Press Walz said:
Here we got a guy on Thanksgiving where we spent time with our families, we ate, we played Yahtzee, we cheered for football or whatever. This guy is apparently in a room ranting about everything else. This is not normal behavior. It’s not healthy.
On the way back from Mar-a-Lago last night, Trump said his MRI results were “perfect, like my phone call where I got impeached. Absolutely perfect.” He then added, “If you want to have it released, I’ll release it.”
A female reporter followed up asking Trump if he could “tell us what they were looking at… what part of the body was the MRI looking at?“
As he has done numerous times when it comes to female reporters - most recently in a White House back and forth with ABC’s Mary Bruce and on Air Force One a few days earlier when he tried to shut down a respected reporter with the phrase “Quiet. Quiet. Piggy” - the president responded with an insult:
I have no idea. It was just an MRI. It wasn’t the brain because I took a cognitive test and aced it. I got a perfect mark, which you would be incapable of doing.
In accordance with the presidents promise, this afternoon the White House released information about the October test, arguing the results were “perfectly normal.”
What is not normal, however, is the use of language of this kind by the leader of the free world. The attacks on reporters who are doing their jobs and the use of damaging, hateful and hurtful language that even children know is inappropriate.
Two responses to Trump’s use of the ‘r-word’ to describe Walz are worth noting.
First, Dr. Timothy Shriver, Special Olympics Chairman, who said the term has
a long, painful and humiliating history, and it reinforces unfair and wrong stereotypes that people with intellectual disabilities are incompetent or worse. Words matter. It’s never OK to use the r-word.
Second, Republican state Senator from Indiana, Michael Bohacek, who in the wake of Trump’s post took to Facebook writing:
Many of you have asked my position on redistricting. I have been an unapologetic advocate for people with intellectual disabilities since the birth of my second daughter. This is not the first time our president has used these insulting and derogatory references and his choices of words have consequences. I will be voting NO on redistricting, perhaps he can use the next 10 months to convince voters that his policies and behavior deserve a congressional majority.
Bohacek, whose daughter has Down Syndrome, included a photo of an article about Trump’s comments about Walz in his statement.
