How MAGA Scrambled Disability Politics

At the height of the civil rights movement, Bob Dole, then a freshman Republican senator from Kansas, gave his first address to Congress and the newly elected President Richard Nixon. Dole had been stationed in Italy during WWII; in the spring of 1945, he was struck by enemy fire and sustained injuries that would limit his mobility for the rest of his life. Standing before Congress on April 14, 1969, Dole delivered a speech that explicitly connected his experience of disability to the broader civil rights movement that had just swept the U.S. “My remarks today concern an exceptional group which I joined on April 14, 24 years ago,” Dole said.

It is a minority group whose existence affects every person in our society and the very fiber of our Nation. … As a minority, it has always known exclusion; maybe not exclusion from the front of the bus, but perhaps from even climbing aboard it … maybe not exclusion from day-to-day life itself, but perhaps from an adequate opportunity to develop and contribute to his or her fullest capacity.

Dole became an emblem for disability rights as a bipartisan issue — most famously embodied in the iconic image of George H.W. Bush signing the Americans with Disabilities Act on the White House lawn, flanked by the two “fathers of the ADA,” Justin Dart (wearing a broad cowboy hat) and Evan Kemp, both white conservative men in wheelchairs.

But personal experience of disability doesn’t guarantee sympathy for protecting disability rights, and not all conservative Republicans in wheelchairs and cowboy hats are committed to equal access. Consider the example of Greg Abbott. The Texas governor has used a wheelchair since he was paralyzed by a falling tree on a jog in his 20s, and has since pushed numerous policies that limit the rights of disabled people in his state. Since 2003, for instance, Abbott has maintained Texas’s claim of “sovereign immunity” from the ADA, a states’-rights argument that denies Texans federal disability protections.

Abbott’s actions are representative of what the disability law and policy expert Sam Crane described to me as the “slow divorce” between the Republican Party and disability rights. In the wake of the civil rights era, the conservative movement had a number of reasons to embrace disability. As a category, disability is an equal-opportunity selector: as the truism says, if you stay alive long enough, the question of whether you’ll become disabled is less a matter of if than when.

“Republicans are just as likely to have a deaf child as Democrats,” Crane said. Among parents of children with disabilities such as Down syndrome, though, religious conservatives are over-represented, because many won’t participate in the elective abortions routinely offered when a fetus is determined to have a disability. And there are some groups — veterans, people working blue-collar jobs — that are statistically more likely to be conservative while also being more likely to acquire a disability through their work.

In recent years, however, the flagrant anti-diversity, -equity and -inclusion cruelty typified by the X feeds of figures like JD Vance or Elon Musk has pulled disability into its crosshairs and accelerated its realignment within the conservative movement. The right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk (and the mob of online followers who piled on in his wake) criticized the use of sign language interpreters at city press conferences during the L.A. wildfires, as though ASL were a kind of literal virtue-signalling, rather than a basic form of language access for a large linguistic community amid an emergency. The R-word is making a comeback, largely thanks to the very online troll armies of the right, led by characters like Musk (who mocks disabled people online and also identifies as autistic.)

The most influential voice in this movement is, of course, Donald Trump. The president has long expressed deeply ableist attitudes alongside his racist and sexist ones, from his days as an ADA-violating real estate developer, including his illegal refusal to put Braille in elevators (“No blind people are going to live in Trump Tower”), to his infamous 2016 campaign-speech mockery of the disabled investigative reporter Serge Kovaleski. In his first term, when his nephew, Fred Trump III, approached the president to advocate for legislation that would help defray the cost of home care for people with disabilities, such as Fred’s son, Trump neatly articulated the eugenic logic that still governs many people’s attitudes toward disability and the financial arguments that undergird recent Republican opposition to disability protection. “The shape they’re in, all the expenses,” Trump told his nephew, “maybe those kinds of people should just die.”

This year, Trump blamed the fatal Jan. 29 collision between a passenger jet and a Black Hawk helicopter on Joe Biden’s DEI hiring practices, erroneously suggesting that Biden’s “dangerous ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ tactics, and specifically recruiting individuals with ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities in the FAA” were responsible for the crash. One prominent disability rights lawyer told me, “I couldn’t believe, in 2025, that after the crash, I had to explain to a national newspaper that the way disability hiring laws work, you literally have to be qualified to perform the essential functions of the job. There are no blind people watching for planes in the air-traffic control tower.”

As absurd as Trump’s claims are, they threaten to reinforce the already abysmally low employment figures for people with disabilities. “Programs like the one President Trump attacked have been part of the federal government’s work to eliminate that stigma,” Colin Killick, the executive director of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, said. “It is deeply disappointing to see our government now deciding instead to make it worse.”

Since DEI entered the national lexicon, activists and advocates have complained that disability was excluded from many progressive initiatives. With all the talk of racial or gender inclusivity, they asked, what about accessibility? The Biden administration responded to these criticisms by issuing an executive order, “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce,” which in turn became one of the prime targets of Trump’s zone-flooding anti-DEI barrage. He repealed Biden’s order on the first day of his second term.

Still, some advocates might benefit from the complicated position disability holds in the larger civil-rights framework. “I feel a sort of survivor’s guilt,” the ADA coordinator at a major land-grant university in the Midwest told me. His school’s administration recently terminated 16 of his colleagues who were doing DEI work, while his department was left unscathed — for now. This disconnect between DEI and disability is playing out at the federal level, too. On Feb. 5, the Office of Personnel Management issued a memo offering guidance on Trump’s DEI directives, but in its instructions, explicitly carved out protections for disability: “Agencies should not terminate or prohibit accessibility or disability-related accommodations,” the memo said, “or other programs that are required by those or related laws.” Craig Trainor, a Trump appointee to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, wrote in a similar memo obtained by ProPublica that while the office would maintain its pause on discrimination cases based on race or gender, disability would get an exception. “Effective immediately, please process complaints that allege only disability-based discrimination,” he wrote. This protection is sure to be short-lived: last week, the Trump administration cut the workforce of the Department of Education virtually in half. The Department’s Secretary, Linda McMahon, said that the cuts won’t affect special education, but the layoffs have explicitly targeted the Office for Civil Rights, which handles disability discrimination claims.

Harold Jordan of the American Civil Liberties Union told ProPublica that one reason for Trainor’s memo was that attacking the rights of people with disabilities would be “politically unpopular.” But there’s also a legal difference between disability protections and those for race and gender. Because of the way the Civil Rights Act is written (and interpreted by the Supreme Court), it’s technically illegal to admit a student or hire a worker solely based on race or gender; such an action would leave the door open to “reverse discrimination” cases, where, for example, a white person can (and, in the coming months, many no doubt will) claim discrimination based on a policy that shows preference to racial minorities. “But the ADA isn’t written that way,” Crane told me. “There’s no reverse discrimination; with a few exceptions, only people with disabilities can sue under the ADA, only for discrimination based on disability. If your employer says they’re reserving a job for a disabled person, that’s completely legal.”

In addition to the influence of the vocal and influential constituency of white, middle-, and upper-class suburban parents of kids with disabilities, the Department of Education may be preserving disability protections because disabled people have a much stronger legal claim to sue them.

Beyond the scapegoating and mockery, the new administration’s impact on disabled people as a class has so far been largely limited to foreboding, even if the layoffs in the federal government — one of the largest employers of people with disabilities in the country — will leave many out of work. But there’s an array of fresh threats on the horizon. Looming above them all are the $880 billion of cuts to Medicaid proposed by the House of Representatives. For the 15 million low-income people with disabilities who rely on Medicaid for health care, these cuts would be devastating.

“Medicaid is how people remain in the community,” Claudia Center, the legal director of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund told me. “Without Medicaid, you’re going to push thousands and thousands of people into nursing homes.” If the cuts proceed, we’re likely to see a repeat from the first Trump administration, when similar threats to overturn the Affordable Care Act and slash Medicaid spurred disabled protestors from groups like ADAPT to climb out of their wheelchairs and stage a die-in outside of Mitch McConnell’s office in the Senate, leading to more than sixty arrests. (D.C. police have wheelchair-accessible paddy wagons.)

If Medicaid cuts threaten the funding source for disability inclusion, another attack against those rights on paper has been underway since before the election.

Last year, the Biden administration issued new regulations for Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. The law itself is just 46 words, passed in 1973 with the support of Dole and a bipartisan group of lawmakers in what feels like a now-ancient political era. It offers accommodations and protections for disability in every federally funded setting, from public schools to hospitals that receive Medicaid dollars (i.e., most of them), and charted the course for the ADA, which extended those protections to privately owned retailers, schools and other public spaces. Like many laws, it relies on regulations to elaborate the statute so that people know how to enforce and interpret it, and these regs get updated from time to time. The Biden administration’s 2024 update added new guidelines for making medical equipment like exam tables and digital services such as hospital kiosks and websites accessible to people with disabilities; strengthening protections for disabled parents, and so on. In the update’s preamble, which is not a legally binding part of the regulation (and didn’t appear in the final version), there is a line that states that “an individual with gender dysphoria may have a disability under Section 504,” and that discrimination based on that condition may be illegal.

That line triggered 17 attorneys general from red states, led by Ken Paxton of Texas, to sue the Department of Health and Human Services, arguing that the insertion of “gender dysphoria” was contrary to the original language of Section 504, and exposes the states to the loss of federal funding. Rather than stopping there — where a new HHS director under Trump could easily and legally advise them to ignore the line about gender dysphoria — the suit went on to conclude that Section 504 is itself unconstitutional.

If a court were to agree with the states, disability rights could be rolled back to where they were before the Nixon administration — back to the bad old days when students like Judy Heumann (a central leader in the fight to enforce 504 after its passage) could be legally denied access to public school because their teacher considered them a fire hazard. While most legal experts I spoke to don’t think that 504 will be overturned entirely, the reality is that the lawsuit’s fate is still unclear.

News of the suit Texas v. Becerra triggered a major freakout across the disability community, with many organizations issuing urgent action alerts to their members. Many of the attorneys general were flooded with calls from concerned parents, whose children’s so-called “504 plans,” which cover public-school accommodations from peanut allergies to ADHD, were suddenly at risk.

In the face of this pressure, several AGs tried to walk back the suit. On Feb. 13, South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson released a statement reassuring parents that “nothing is changing, and your child’s accommodations are not going away.” He also invoked his personal relationship with disability: “My grandfather was wounded in World War II and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair, so there’s no way I would ever do anything to take away accommodations for anyone with a disability.” He concluded that Trump’s executive order on gender identity “resolves his concerns, so our mission is complete.” But six days later, all 17 states filed a joint status report that reaffirmed everything in the original complaint, including their assertion that 504 — the entire 50-year-old law — is unconstitutional. They also doubled down on their attack on disabled people’s right (upheld by the Supreme Court’s 1999 Olmstead decision) to live and receive care outside of institutions like nursing homes or hospitals, in the “most integrated setting.”

The panic that these Republican attacks cause in and among vulnerable minority communities can set groups at odds with one another. The Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund issued a correction and update to an explanatory webinar it posted on Texas v. Becerra after some community members complained that the suit’s attack on trans rights was being underemphasized in favor of protecting disability rights. But several activists told me off the record that while they were personally invested in the rights of trans people, in this particular case — which, if it goes forward, will be heard before the deeply conservative judges of Texas’s Fifth Circuit — leading with trans issues might not be the most strategic approach.

Crane, who identifies as multiple disabled and queer, dismissed the idea that there was any tension at play between protecting trans and disability rights here.

“I care about trans issues a lot. If there were a trolley problem, where I had to choose if a trolley would hit my trans loved ones instead of disabled people — I wouldn’t be able to stomach sacrificing trans rights. But there’s no choosing sides, because there’s no trans rights at issue in this case,” she said. The line about gender dysphoria in the regulations’ preamble doesn’t require any legal argument to overturn — HHS can simply ignore it, and choose not to enforce it — the preamble isn’t part of the law. “They used it to fabricate a lawsuit over the issue,” Crane said.

Furthermore, protecting disabled rights means protecting trans people, too, even if the Trump administration won’t recognize gender dysphoria as a protected disability. “There’s a substantial overlap between disability and trans status among K-12 students,” Center said. A 2015 survey found that 39% of nearly 28,000 transgender respondents “had one or more disabilities, compared to the 15% disability prevalence of the general population,” and trans people are three to six times more likely to receive an autism diagnosis. (Conservatives have weaponized this connection, making the astonishingly ableist argument that the trans person’s autism muddies their ability to recognize their own gender, and have even passed laws specifically preventing autistic people from receiving gender-affirming care.)

Universal design is a popular idea in disability thinking: design for the edge case — like the curb cut that allows the wheelchair user to independently roll onto a sidewalk — and you end up benefiting everyone from kids on scooters to elders pulling carts. But thinking about the fate of the A (accessibility) in the attack on DEIA, it occurred to me that there was a sort of reverse curb-cut effect at play; removing rights for one group has a spillover effect that hurts others, too. When Abbott signed S.B. 1, a restrictive bill that criminalized offering anyone assistance at the ballot box, the intent seemed to be to make voting more difficult for Black and Latino voters who had lower rates of English literacy than other groups. But the law also disenfranchised voters with disabilities who employed personal care attendants. Our vulnerabilities are interconnected. Police violence disproportionately affects both people of color and people with disabilities: Deaf people who don’t hear an officer’s barked orders, or a person with a mental illness or is neurodivergent, who doesn’t respond in a predictable way, are far more likely to face injury or death at the hands of the police. And, of course, this possibility is even greater when the person with a disability is also a person of color. As conceptually tempting as it is to separate out the A from DEIA, these identities and issues are all intertwined.

Conservatives — as well as increasing an number of independents frustrated by the left’s persistent losses — are fond of dismissing DEI as performative identity politics with no material effect on the real world.

“The monomaniacal focus on stigma has been a terrible development for our understanding of disability,” Freddie DeBoer, a self-described “professionally heterodox” thinker, wrote last month. Stigma, he argued, is “a perfect metonym for 21st-century progressivism, the gradual replacement of the actual problem with how people feel about the problem.”

But while DeBoer scores points dunking on coddled college students demanding accommodations for their emotional-support snakes, the reality is that stigma remains the engine of discrimination, with unmistakably material consequences. “A lot of times, what gets referred to as ‘identity politics’ is really about how people are treated,” Center said. “It’s about how people are treated at work, at the doctor’s office. Disabled people still face significant barriers across crucial sectors of society: in school, government, medicine, at work.”

Near the end of his life, Dole supported Trump with the vexed ambivalence of many old-world conservatives. “I’m a Trumper,” he told USA Today, “But I’m sort of Trumped out.” There are still glimmers of bipartisan support for disability rights in U.S. politics, but Trump’s kiss-the-ring approach has made it more difficult for red-state disability advocates. Kimberly Tissot, who runs Able SC, a South Carolina disability nonprofit, said that she has seen her state’s lawmakers, including some members of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, “talk to their constituents — Republican voters with disabilities —– and they’ve listened.”

But Tissot says in the present climate, she’s concerned about the durability of this attention to disability. “It seems like every state is taking direction from the administration,” she said, “and the administration is very uninformed.”

Tissot told me about a grant she’d written whose fate was now doomed because it has the word “Equity” in the title. The grant would support disabled survivors of domestic violence in South Carolina, ensuring that they have equal access to services and prevention, just like the rest of the population. “That’s what equity means,” Tissot said. “But that’s not how the administration sees it. They think of it as special treatment.”