How Mental Illness Became a Scapegoat for Trump’s White Supremacy

This is An Unquiet Mind, a National Magazine Award-winning monthly column by s.e. smith that explores disability identity and its interaction with the world at large.

I can’t recall the first time I heard the words “no sane person could have done this” in response to some mass trauma or horrific incident. No sane person would shoot up a school. No sane person would sexually abuse a child. No sane person would allow hundreds of thousands of people to die of coronavirus disease. I’ve had a lifetime of hearing sane people attribute everything they dislike, the actions of every person they loathe, to mental illness.

Sane people don’t mean it that way, they say, but what is a mad person to think? What is someone who is crazy, insane, certifiable, a lunatic, bonkers, batshit, loco, supposed to believe when someone says that a negative behavior or person is “crazy,” that “sane” people are not capable of committing atrocities? The takeaway is often that people like me are bad, that bad deeds can be blamed on us, and that we’ll never face accountability for our actions because we use mental illness as an excuse. It doesn’t feel like a get out-of-jail-free card when people are killed by police for being crazy in public, denied jobs because of their mental health history, or labeled “undateable” because of their serious mental illness. Or, for that matter, when they are incarcerated indefinitely in mental health facilities because they are deemed unfit to stand trial.

The rate at which people have been blaming mental illness for every kind of bad occurrence has reached a fever pitch in the era of the Trump administration. Now, I hear a lot about how the president is unfit, how he is hiding something, how he is unstable.

It is an especially big problem among the hashtag resistance grifters—the predominantly white “progressives” who have used Trumpism as a springboard to social media fame and some fortune. Along with their sycophants, they appeal to a desperate progressive audience looking for guidance and a way to survive in the Trump era. Each day brings a new round of calling Trump insane and dissecting his every move for proof of dementia. This is disablism, and the disability community has clearly labeled it as such.

They know what they’re doing is wrong. They know why it’s wrong. They’re even known to lecture people about not being disablist in other contexts. They just don’t care, in this one case, or they feel that the benefits are worth the costs, that if everyone is somehow convinced that the president is “insane”, everything will change. It is inconvenient to admit that this is disablist behavior because that would mean they would have to stop doing it if they want to live their values, and because disablism runs deep in social movements, so it’s easy to go viral with disablist commentary, the dopamine of the likes ticking upward too seductive to pass up.

They like doing it. It’s cheap and easy. Fuck anyone harmed, right? For the cause! When they mention my own diagnosis as one that might fit Trump, it is like being punched. I let myself forget I’m not seen as a real human being deserving of compassion and support. Their fear and anger show in this desire to distance themselves as much as possible from the president’s wild, hateful actions. When sane white people insist that labeling the president as mad is too important, that they deserve a disablism pass, I hear an echo of determination: I’m not like him. I could never be him. Slamming the president with a mental health diagnosis is a form of distancing that makes it hard to engage with the actual harm he is doing. It comes from desperation to make it clear that progressives who benefit from white privilege don’t have the capacity to inflict harm, not like that man, who is clearly insane. In failing to acknowledge his whiteness and the fact that they share it, they also perforce fail to examine the effect his whiteness has on millions of BIPOC living in America.

Slamming the president with a mental health diagnosis is a form of distancing that makes it hard to engage with the actual harm he is doing.

This is a cruel bind, because the way we address mental illness is deeply, deeply rooted in white supremacy; the very diagnoses we use have their origins in the views of slavers and murderers. To this day, mental health diagnoses are racially disproportionate and Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latinx people struggle to access the care they need. Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people are more likely to be subjected to extrajudicial execution, and many of those killed by police also have mental health conditions. When white members of the public treat mental health as a joke or a way to ding the president, they are also complicit in a long history of using mental illness as a cudgel, especially powerfully against people of color, while also neatly sidestepping their own role in why the president is there, and why he remains there.

When the question is reframed: “How do the president’s actions here uphold white supremacy,” instead of “is the president unfit?,” the results may be uncomfortable for some, especially given society’s history of giving mentally ill white people who commit atrocities an out. A slew of white people who have done horrible things have been labeled mentally ill and swaddled in compassion. Dylan Roof, for example, was taken alive and got takeout on his way to jail after killing nine people at worship. This, too, is white supremacy at work.

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If the dizzying shift in tone when talking about mental illness with the aim to condemn one kind of person and garner empathy for another is understood as intentional and integral to white supremacy, the next logical question is: Will white nondisabled people ever take responsibility for their own complicity? The president is in power because a large number of people put him there. 52 percent of white women voted for that man, 63 percent of white men did, and some spoke one way and voted another. “But I didn’t vote for him,” nondisabled white people tell me. “I organized voters. I gave elders rides to the polls. I canvassed for another candidate. I donated.” Progressives from a variety of factions did all these things and more in 2016. Many were crushed when their candidate lost four years ago, and some have been struggling ever since to mitigate the president’s harm.

Those most at risk of Trump’s cruel policies and conflicting actions—LGBQT people, BIPOC, disabled people, Jewish people, Muslims—warned people as Trump ascended in 2016, around the dinner table, at book clubs, on Twitter, and in editorials. Progressive voters nodded sagely at these warnings, but didn’t internalize them until it was too late. They focused, for example, on the optics of Trump’s mockery of Serge Kovaleski, a disabled Pulitzer-winning New York Times reporter, rather than policy, like Trump’s call for mental health care that includes “more beds,” which is code for “more institutions to put the beds in,” not understanding that the problem wasn’t childish mockery, but what lay beneath it, and who he empowered with his words. “Trump’s just crazy,” earnest progressives said. “He can’t do that much damage.”

Sane people are capable of acts of great evil, just as mad people are, and mental illness is not the reason for their actions, nor does it excuse them. We are all of us capable of evil—it lies beneath our skin, electric. That is a scary truth for those who want to put themselves as far away from the president as possible.

When you attribute someone’s evil actions to their mental health status rather than their actual root cause—like white supremacy—then that evil is no longer presented as a choice. It is instead presented as inherent and inevitable. When you say the president is unfit because he stumbles on a ramp, or speculate about his cognitive ability while he talks, you are not talking about the intentional evil made plain in his speech, nor are you talking about things he is actually doing right now that cause harm. He has prematurely ended thousands of lives and done tremendous damage that will take decades to unravel while progressives on Twitter, on Saturday Night Live, on Sunday morning talk shows, got in some good dunks about the crazy president.

Every time I hear people saying that Trump’s behavior is “crazy,” I hear that the speaker thinks madness is not just an explanation, but an excuse, and a reason to remove someone from a role of authority—that the mad are dangerous, hateful people by nature, who need to be kept away from society. What I hardly ever hear is the (usually) white nondisabled speaker confronting white supremacy squarely and aggressively for what it is, because the thing that makes you into a white supremacist isn’t insanity. It’s privilege, and cruelty, and complicity that lifts white supremacists up into seats of power.

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