Disgust, Horror, and “Elimination”: Trump and RFK Jr.’s Eugenicist Autism Conference

^{“Donald Trump” by Gage Skidmore  is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0}

On Monday, President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. held a press conference on their attempts to divine the causes of autism—much to the chagrin of many autistic adults, who were completely excluded from the process. The two, alongside administration officials including Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, claimed without definitive scientific evidence that Tylenol during pregnancy, one of the only means to treat fever, was a leading factor in children becoming autistic—demanding, in Trump’s case, that women discontinue its use.

Trump announced within the first ten minutes of the conference that the National Institutes of Health, “to help reach the ultimate goal of ending the autism,” would launch some 13 research grants to address what Kennedy called the “autism epidemic” and “how patients and parents can prevent and reverse this alarming trend.”

Trump’s long history of being obsessed with eugenics, and of ableist statements, set the tone for a press conference that rejected the idea of autistic...