Do Trump Supporters Mind When He Mocks Biden’s Stutter?

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I believe it was in the afternoon, early evening.

I was on my

way

to

meet my friends to go bowling.

This is staff writer John Hendrickson.

John covers politics for the Atlantic.

He's also had a stutter since he was a kid.

I was on the subway and I got a text from a different friend who sent me a tweet that contained a video.

So I held it up to my ear and I listened to it.

Two nights ago we all heard Crooked Joe's angry, dark, hate-filled rant of a State of the Union address.

Wasn't it, didn't it, bring us together?

Emergency Robert or bring the country

together.

I'm going to bring it together.

And the thing that jumped out at me was

how

Trump's audience laughed.

Together.

I'm going to bring it together.

I'm Hannah Rosen.

This is Radio Atlantic.

In his decade or so in politics, Donald Trump often talks like a bully.

We know he nicknames opponents, Little Marco, Crazy Nancy, Bird Brain.

That one was for Nikki Haley.

And now that it's just him and Biden, Crooked Joe, or Sleepy Joe, or he calls him a low IQ individual or cognitively impaired.

But there's one line he hasn't crossed until this year.

Through it all, though,

he

never

openly mocked Biden's stutter.

It's been this ongoing thing about Biden has dementia, all different versions of that idea.

But

he didn't outright make fun of Biden for being a person who stutters until January of this year.

That's why Crooked Joe is staging his pathetic fear-mongering campaign event in Pennsylvania today.

Did you see him?

He was stuttering through the whole thing.

He's going,

he's a threat to democracy.

Biden had

delivered a big

speech to mark the anniversary of January 6th.

He's saying, I'm a threat to democracy.

He's a threat to

democracy.

Couldn't read the word.

Trump has

said and

done

worse

things than this.

Obviously, he's done many, many worse things than this.

But the

juvenile

element of it,

there was just something

really particular about this.

It was sort of uniquely grotesque.

So John and I decided to test out a question.

What did Trump supporters really think of him making fun of Biden?

If John went to a rally and asked them, what would they say to his face?

Before we get there, though, something to know first.

A lot of people think of Biden as someone who used to stutter, if they think about it at all.

Biden himself has generally talked about it as something he overcame.

But when John was covering Biden in the 2020 race, he saw something different.

As John described it, in the middle of a speech, Biden would suddenly stop, pinch his eyes closed, thrust his hands forward as if trying to pull the missing sound from his mouth.

In Biden, John recognized not a former stutterer, but someone who was working very hard and largely successfully to manage his stutter.

In 2020, Biden agreed to sit down for an interview with John, and he shared some painful memories with him, like the nun who made fun of him in seventh grade, Mr.

B-B-Biden.

And in that same article, John, who hadn't written much about his own stutter, shared some of his own memories, like about the kid at baseball camp who would yell, stutter boy, and snap his fingers as if John were a dog.

After that article came out, something unexpected happened to John.

He became a kind of public face of adults who stutter.

Like he even went on TV to talk about the article, something he'd never imagined he'd want to do.

Joining me now, the author of that piece, John Hendrickson, senior politics editor for The Atlantic.

John, I'm so glad you're here.

This story is very personal to you.

You've experienced life with a stutter.

What about your experience has helped you identify Joe Biden's, and it's something that most of us just saw as him misspeaking.

People misunderstand

Dan

stuttering a lot.

You know, it isn't

merely repetition of a word.

It isn't merely blocking on a word.

It's tons of things.

It's loss of eye contact, as I'm doing at this exact moment.

Just because it takes a little longer every now and then to

get out a sentence, it doesn't mean that the person doesn't know what they're trying to say.

John got an overwhelming response to the piece.

Within days, hundreds and hundreds of people who stutter sent him messages.

They swapped stories about growing up with a stutter.

And then John went on to write a book about it called Life on Delay.

And he got more comfortable talking in public.

Here he is again on TV.

Most people don't even know

what stuttering

is.

Barely anybody outside the community or outside the speech language pathologist community even knows that it's a neurological disorder.

Pretty much everybody thinks it's just a manifestation of nervousness or anxiety or that a person is

dumb.

We have a real antiquated cultural view of this thing.

So John had spent several years dragging people out of those dark ages,

and then his friend sent him that video of Trump at the rally imitating the stutter in front of an audience.

Together.

I'm going to bring it together.

Why do you think Trump crossed that line?

Like, he has not made fun of Joe Biden's stutter for now years.

So, do you have any guesses about why now?

I think it's

notable that the

two times Trump has

openly done this have both come on the

heels of a big

Biden speech.

In January, it was Biden's

pro-democracy speech on the anniversary of the insurrection.

Trump mocked him, saying,

duh duh duh democracy.

And then two days after

Biden s

dated the

Union address, Trump mocked him saying

he's going to bring this country to

together.

Now, here is where I would play you some tape of Biden himself talking, because Biden didn't actually stutter on the word together.

He actually didn't even say those exact words.

Trump is doing more of what John considers a vaudeville impression of Biden, knowing that the president's stutter is a way to attack him.

Now, John is a seasoned reporter and Biden and Trump are politicians.

So John isn't worried about their feelings.

He is, however, worried about the audience laughing.

What does it mean that a crowd heard Trump say, ta-ta-ta-together together and found it funny?

It's too easy to

roll your eyes and say, oh, that's just Trumpy and Trump.

Which

I think to a degree I can be sympathetic to that argument, but that doesn't

mean

his supporters, who are also adults, they don't have to

laugh.

They're either choosing to laugh

or it's an involuntary reaction and they're naturally laughing.

Did you hear that immediately, or did you have to re-watch it to see that?

I immediately heard it.

And that happened back in January as well.

And I think that's the thing that compels me to

go talk to his supporters this weekend.

Turn right onto Northwest Boulevard.

I guess we're just at the edge of a, like,

like an airport.

I think this is North Dayton.

North Dayton.

Okay.

A week after mocking Biden's stutter, Trump had a rally planned in Ohio.

So John and I rented a car and made our way to the tarmac of the Dayton International Airport.

John had a pretty specific goal.

I'm less interested in Trump himself

and

more interested in

talking to as many of his supporters as I can

and asking them, how do you feel about Trump mocking people with disabilities?

I've interviewed many Trump supporters over the past nine

years,

and

99.9% of them have been polite and

they don't mock me or make fun of me.

They're

human beings.

And so,

given that Trump has now

repeatedly

and openly

mocked Biden's

daughter, and he's previously mocked other disabilities,

I'm interested if it bothers his supporters or not, because a topic like disability is bipartisan.

It is neutral.

It is apolitical.

Well, we hope, we hope, but that's maybe the hypothesis that you're testing.

After the break, John and I test the hypothesis with the crowd in Ohio.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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I'm amazed

at how his

rallies have evolved into this kind of Grateful Dead traveling road show.

Vendors follow him around the country, and even certain attendees follow him around the country.

This is what you mean by the carnival atmosphere.

There's like lots and lots of merchants.

I'm amazed at the sheer

volume of

different t-shirts.

Trumpetator, I'll be back.

Jesus is my savior.

Trump is my president.

Trump and Mount Rushmore, and so he's on there, but he's also on a

motorcycle.

You know, not just food vendors and t-shirt vendors, but

everything you can think of.

And it truly is this community.

It has this

weird juxtaposition of being very jovial, celebratory,

warm, and he plays all this nostalgic music.

And then he gets up there and he

delivers these apocalyptic monologues.

So it's just it's it's unlike anything else.

We made our way through the vendors, across the windy tarmac, to the line of people waiting to get through security.

John and I skipped over the guy in the media lies t-shirt and got to work with our informal survey.

Do you have any interest in a brief interview about the event?

Sure.

Thanks.

First

time you ever seen Trump or have you seen him before?

First time in person, yes.

There were diehards who traveled hours to be there.

Locals, just excited he was back in Ohio.

A couple of undecided looking to hear him in person.

We would get the basics, and then John would ask if they saw the Georgia rally where Trump had mocked Biden's stutter.

Did you happen to catch any of Trump's Georgia event he did a week ago on Saturday?

I did, as a matter of fact, Rome, Georgia.

I did not.

Actually, I didn't even know he was in Dayton until I saw it on TikTok this morning.

We jumped in the car and came.

And then the question:

Last week, Trump mocked Biden's

daughter.

He was saying, like,

we're going to bring the country together.

Together.

It's not the Christian way to be.

And

I just feel like it makes Trump look bad when he's probably not a bad person.

This is Cindy Rossbach.

She and her husband Todd had different opinions.

After what we've seen from the administration,

they want to put him in jail for life.

I think he's got every right to do whatever he wants to do at this point.

I disagree because I think when you make fun of people, it just makes you look bad.

We kept talking to more people.

This is Melina from Chilcoffee, Ohio.

He's going to say what he says.

When he was in office, our economy was great.

We got along with every other country.

That's all I care about.

And Vanessa Miller from Cincinnati.

Trump is a good man.

He's not perfect.

Biden is not handicapped.

He's just an ass and he does not care about this country.

So

if Trump made fun of Biden, well, like I said, he's not perfect, but it wasn't about a disability.

It was about how he has made this country dysfunctional, not disabled.

A lot of people just detoured into the mental acuity lane.

Here's Sharon.

from the Dayton area.

The president that we have today can't speak.

He can't walk.

He can't talk.

And he's definitely not thinking for himself.

He's not making the decisions.

He is somebody's puppet.

And so Biden has a

neurological disorder.

He has a stutter.

No, I do too.

Do you know anybody who has one?

Yeah, my cousin had a stutter.

You know, it's just...

I don't.

You can't play into your feelings.

You have to take this stuff seriously when it comes to our policy and our country.

Most people touched it lightly, if at all, and then moved on to bigger things.

Dementia, the economy, country.

One man we talked to, though, R.

C.

Pittman, he did not mind getting into it.

He came with bikers for Trump, and we chose to talk to him because we were interested in disability.

And Pittman was in a transport chair.

He said he couldn't walk very well.

Have you ever

known anybody growing up or presently

this gutter?

Like I did.

Yeah.

And we made fun of them.

And we poked fun at them.

And they didn't get offended.

You know, the same thing with me.

I had big ears.

They used to call me Dumbo when I was a kid.

We have a guy that rides with us, one of our chapter members, took his leg off from here down.

So

now instead of Geronimo up there on his, like mine says Casper.

That's my road name.

We changed his from Geronimo to Stumpy.

I mean, did it offend him?

Hell no, he's Stumpy.

Would be the same as me saying,

the damn boy, can't you talk better than that?

It's not degrading.

You follow me, it just, you know,

it's words.

It's an expression of

thought.

After we thanked him and moved on,

I asked John what he thought.

I am interested in

that concept of like, you know, the difference between the teasing and degrading.

Yeah, I actually thought that was interesting.

Well, and I wonder if his

biker friend who's an amputee, you know, they call him

Stumpy.

Like,

does that secretly bother him or not?

Yeah, I did wonder about that.

Like, can we have Stumpy's phone number?

If teasing is a thing between friends, Trump and Biden are clearly not friends.

But again, John did not come here to think about how Trump's words affect Biden's feelings.

Biden's a public figure and a politician.

He came here to see how they land in the crowd and then beyond the crowd, outside in the world.

But I think that the

concern among

members of of the disability

community is that kids and teenagers are going to watch Trump say tut-tut-tut together and then

think it's okay to then go do that to other people.

There is an aspect of that that you,

it's unfortunate.

Yeah.

One striking thing from our time in Ohio was the number of people we talked to who worked with kids.

Sometimes even kids with learning disabilities.

Cheryl from Ohio, for example, she has a learning disability herself.

So she feels especially connected to kids who struggle.

And if a kid asks you, why is the president making fun of

people with disabilities, what would you say?

I tell them they're not actually making fun.

They're just trying to, they are using those

words to win.

That's how you win.

You're just finding a way for you to become the winner and they become the loser.

It's like trash talking.

It's just trash talking.

I've worked in special education my whole life so I definitely don't agree with that at all.

You don't agree with what?

Anybody making fun of people that have disabilities.

This is Shanna from Indiana.

She didn't want to use her last name.

Shanna has a special ed degree and taught middle schoolers with learning disabilities.

I asked her if there was bullying or if kids made fun of each other in her school, and she said, all the time.

If one of your kids said, hey, why is our president making fun of disabled people?

Like, I thought you told us not to do that.

What would you say to a kid as a teacher?

What would I say?

That

regardless of what comes out of people's mouths, that we're to forgive them.

And does it mean that they did it on purpose

because

our hearts are wicked?

And lastly, Susie Michaeloff from Ohio, who taught math for three decades.

This is small on the scale of what the kids are subjected to nowadays.

So I think overall, he can show them he's a good leader.

So

when you look at what he's done and what he can do with a nation,

then you have to put that aside.

You have to forgive that.

So I forgive him for doing that.

I find it interesting that some of these teachers and special ways of teachers

could be

so compassionate Monday through Friday and then

go to a Trump rally on Saturday.

They're sending their prisoners to see us.

They're sending and they're bringing them right to the border.

I've seen the humanity and these humanity, these are bad, these are animals, okay?

And we have to stop it.

Back in the hotel after the rally, John and I unpacked our thoughts about our day of interviews.

We were both stuck on the people who worked with kids, particularly the special ed teachers.

And that doesn't mean that they're not compassionate on Saturday, but

it's another level of Trump supporter to go to the rally.

It's just an odd

juxtaposition to think of a

really thoughtful, compassionate special ed teacher

Monday through Friday serving their students and then getting up Saturday and going to this

rally where the person's talking about a bloodbath.

Do you think they think of him as compassionate or not compassionate or they just don't think about it?

I think people are attracted to Trump's power.

It's just interesting to see the different slices of them.

Like the way they were in the Trump rally, the way they could be moved by that.

But then there's this whole other side of them.

Like I believe that those people who said they had a friend who stutters, that they would be kind to that friend.

Like I could see that, that they would care about those people in context with those people.

And that's all I have to say.

There's no like squaring the two different versions of that person.

There's like rally person and then there's classroom person and they're both inside the same person.

And that's what Trump is so good at:

pulling out the darker side of people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That doesn't mean that a person's a bad person.

And it's not like every day, like, you walk around in life and you're 60% good, 40% bad.

But just

Trump has a way of

making making the bad stuff okay.

This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudina Bade.

It was engineered by Rob Smirciak, fact-checked by Yvonne Kim.

Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I'm Hannah Rosen.

Thank you for listening.

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