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Updated March 26, 2024 at 2:00 PM ET
Last weekend, I stood among thousands of Donald Trump supporters on a windy airfield, watching them turn their attention to their candidate. I attended the former president’s event outside Dayton, Ohio, with a flash of inspiration from a week earlier at a Trump rally in Georgia, where Trump had imitated President Joe Biden’s lifelong stutter and the crowd erupted in laughter.
Mocking Biden isn’t the worst thing Trump has ever done. Biden is the adult and the most famous. He doesn’t need to be fawned over by other politicians or the media. Trump despises everyone, but he conspicuously avoided mocking Biden’s stutter during the 2020 campaign. It’s time to stop.
But this is a bigger issue than Biden. Stuttering is a genetic neurological disorder covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act that affects 3 million Americans. Trump may or may not know that, but he certainly knows that having a disability is something both Democrats and Republicans experience. Many of Trump’s supporters are older and therefore more likely to have a disability themselves. Most of us can probably think of at least one friend or family member with a disability; someone we don’t want to be mocked by a bully on stage.
While waiting for Trump’s arrival on his private jet on Saturday, my colleague Hanna Rosin and I wandered the Wright Brothers Aero campus, awkwardly asking rally-goers what they were comfortable with. Nearly everyone was troubled by specific examples of Trump’s recent bullying. But as they unpacked their thoughts, they found more and more ways to excuse their candidate’s actions. Many of those interviewed contradicted themselves multiple times, likely due to certain variables. I stutter, and that day I was asking real people how they felt about Trump making fun of stuttering.
Todd and Cindy Rosbach, a married couple from Dayton, were waiting in a long, winding line to attend Trump’s sixth rally. “He’s the best president I’ve ever seen,” Todd said. “Maybe Reagan’s second.” I asked him if he’d seen Trump’s remarks at the Georgia rally, especially when he imitated Biden’s stutter. He saw it all. “At this point, I think Trump has the right to do whatever he wants,” Todd said. “You know, the level of cruelty may seem harsh, but they’re so cruel to him that it seems justified.”
“I’m against it, because I think when you make fun of people it just makes you look bad,” his wife, Cindy, said. After a moment, she added, “That’s not the Christian way,” and “I feel like it makes Trump look bad, because maybe he’s not a bad person, but he’s just stooping to their level, and I don’t like that.” Still, neither of them thought Trump would do anything between now and November that would cost them their votes.
Further back in the line was Cheryl Beverly, from Chillicothe, Ohio, who said she works locally to help children out of homelessness. Beverly said she has a learning disability and struggles with spelling. Even as an adult, she is regularly mocked. “It hurts sometimes,” she said. She acknowledged that it’s “painful to see so many people making fun of people with disabilities,” and pointed to the risk of suicide and addiction for members of the community. “We just go into dark secret holes and don’t come out,” Beverly said. Still, she said she plans to vote for Trump this fall. She was able to separate her personal feelings from the mockery of Trump by blaming his actions on politics. If a child asked her about the Trump scorn, she imagined she would liken it to a game. “You’re just looking for a way for you to be the winner and for them to be the loser,” she said. “It’s just a bad rap.”
Near the food trucks at the venue, I started talking to a woman from Cincinnati named Vanessa Miller. She was wearing a T-shirt that read, “Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my President,” and a dog tag with the Serenity Prayer inscribed on it. She had never seen or heard of the video of Trump impersonating Biden. “Trump is a good man,” Miller said. “He’s not perfect. Biden is not disabled. He’s just an asshole who doesn’t care about this country.” She continued, “If Trump made fun of Biden, well, like I said, he’s not perfect, but it’s not about disability. It’s about how he’s made this country dysfunctional, not disabled.”
After a moment, she told me, “Biden doesn’t stutter. He’s mentally incompetent to run this country.” But then she did something amazing. She reached out and grabbed my arm in a motherly way. “And I know what you’re saying. I know what you’re saying,” she said, acknowledging my stutter. “It’s shameful for people to be unkind to people with disabilities. It’s awful. It’s really disgusting. And I think I understand that in elections, it gets ugly, elections get competitive, people say all sorts of things, people do all sorts of things.”
I unlocked my phone and showed her a video of me stammering and stammering at Trump. She pointed to the mainstream media in general. “When the press incites people and uses disability to make people angry, that’s exactly what they want,” she said. There’s nothing stopping her from voting for Trump.
This pattern continued in nearly every interaction that day: skepticism, momentary condemnation, and finally the conclusion that Trump was still worth voting for. “Not to be sarcastic, but I don’t need Trump to be my best friend,” a woman named Susie Micallof, who runs the Massenasium tutoring center, told me. “I just want what’s best for the country and for me, so I’ll just have to ignore it. Everyone has their good and their bad.”
“I would still support him because I think people make mistakes, people say things they shouldn’t, and I think God will judge them for that, and we should forgive him,” Shanna, a special education teacher from Indiana who didn’t give her last name, told me. If Trump mocks Biden’s stutter at the rally, she said, she’ll want to write him a letter saying, “You shouldn’t mock anyone because we all come from God.”
Saturday’s event was organized by the Bucky Values Political Action Committee, ostensibly to support U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, but the real attraction was, of course, Trump. Moreno, who won Ohio’s Republican primary last night, was simply named to the president’s list of warm-up speakers, along with South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance and Ohio Representative Jim Jordan.
As Trump’s plane landed on the runway behind the stage, a dramatic electric guitar instrumental from the movie “Top Gun” played over the speakers. The wind shook the teleprompter, making it nearly impossible to read Trump’s prepared remarks. So Trump went off script and rambled for about 90 minutes. “Hey, it’s a nice Saturday. What else do you have to do?” Trump said. Most of Trump’s rhetoric oscillated between indignation and threat. He called immigrants “animals” and warned of a “genocide” next year. (The latter comment came after Trump spoke about the auto industry, but some intuited it as a reference to political violence.) Trump didn’t imitate Biden’s school-style stutter this time, but he repeatedly attacked Biden’s speech. “He can’t talk,” Trump said.
People started lining up to leave long before Trump’s speech ended. When the event finally wrapped up, I was loitering by one of the merch booths. (T-shirt and sticker sales that day included Joe and Ho Gotta Go, Jihad Joe, Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore, and a cartoon of Trump urinating on Biden, Calvin and Hobbes-style.) A union man named Joseph Smock told me he took the “red pill” eight years ago after seeing the effects of illegal immigration in his native California. (He now lives in Dayton.) Unlike many of the other attendees I spoke to, Smock fully acknowledged Biden’s history of stuttering, rather than dismissing it as a media fiction or a political ploy to gain sympathy. He characterized Trump as someone with a “hardline mindset.” When you’re in the big leagues like Biden, Trump “will attack you, and if he finds a weakness, he’ll go after it. Some people like that, some people don’t.”
A man named Wes Huff rode past on an electric scooter with his wife Lisa, beaming. Wes told me it was his first time at a Trump rally and he thought it was “awesome.” Wes is disabled. He has diabetes and kidney failure and is missing five toes. All of his siblings are disabled, too. He hadn’t seen the Trump video from a week ago. I asked Huff a hypothetical question: If Biden made fun of a wheelchair user like his rival, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, would he be offended by it? “Yeah, I would,” Huff replied.
But then our conversation turned back to his stuttering. “I actually stuttered,” he said. He told me he was bullied for it as a child, and that a former coworker who stuttered was mocked as an adult. With kindness and compassion, Huff described their friendship and the way he cared for his coworker. “You can’t make fun of people with disabilities,” he said. He also said he plans to vote for Trump this fall.
Related Podcasts Listen to John Hendrickson discuss this article with Hanna Rosin on Radio Atlantic: Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts
This article previously incorrectly stated Suzie Micalloff’s last name.