How Trump Exemplifies Our Ableist Culture
By Steven W. Thrasher,
Scientific American
| 10. 07. 2020
It was a grotesque sight: the president of the United States preening from the White House balcony, his mask pulled defiantly off his face, able to infect anyone around him with the novel coronavirus. He had just been released from Walter Reed hospital, after he’d tweeted that we shouldn’t “be afraid of COVID” or “let it dominate your life”—as if it hadn’t already killed more than 200,000 people in the United States alone, including a dear friend of mine.
The coming narrative was depressing, predictable and sadly bipartisan: the president was virtue-signaling that he was a strong man who had beat a terrible disease. He hadn’t let COVID-19 win—he’d crushed it. He was dancing on the graves of people who had let themselves die because they were weak. Like gloating Jair Bolsonaro after he’d defeated the virus on Brazil’s COVID-19 battlefield, President Donald J. Trump was now a COVID survivor—and if he could be, so could you. If you encountered the coronavirus, had “good genes,” and were just plain strong enough, Trump seemed to be saying...
Related Articles
By Harry Hunter, PET BioNews | 08.11.2025
The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology has announced plans to publish a POSTnote and called for submissions on surrogacy law in the UK and internationally.
The current UK surrogacy laws, largely based on legislation from the 1980s, have been...
By Sayantani DasGupta, MedPage Today | 08.05.2025
It's just a jeans ad.
It's not that deep.
It's just social media outrage.
Should physicians care about the recent American Eagle "Sydney Sweeney Has Good Genes Jeans" controversy? What, if anything, does the provocative campaign have to...
By Zusha Elinson, The Wall Street Journal | 08.12.2025
BERKELEY, Calif.—Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, a mathematician, spent seven years researching how to keep an advanced form of artificial intelligence from destroying humanity before he concluded that stopping it wasn’t possible—at least anytime soon.
Now, he’s turned his considerable brainpower to promoting...
By Gregory Laub and Hannah Glaser, MedPage Today | 08.07.2025
In this MedPage Today interview, Leigh Turner, PhD, a professor of health policy and bioethics at the University of California Irvine, unpacks the growing influence of stem cell clinics and the blurred line between medicine and marketing. He explains how...