As an Autistic Father of Autistic Boys, I Am Pleased That Donald Trump and RFK Jr. Discovered the Cause AND Cure for Autism!
Because I got the vaccine and all of the booster shots, I did not contract COVID-19. It probably didn't hurt that, even during non-pandemic times, I seldom left my home or interacted with people other than my family.
So when Donald Trump would pop up on television alongside poor Dr. Fauci, a good man who became one of the most hated figures in American history because he prevented millions of deaths, to jibber-jabber about treating the vaccine by injecting disinfectants or UV light, it did not affect me directly.
Trump’s arrogant but ignorant commentary on COVID-19 affected me indirectly because the pandemic changed the way we live in profound ways and helped lay the groundwork for Trump’s reelection. COVID-19 affected everyone, including Trump, who tragically survived what appeared to be a fierce case of the virus.
As the autistic father of two autistic boys, and the husband of a therapist who specializes in treating the neurodivergent, it’s hard to overstate the significance of autism in my life.
the two greatest medical minds of our time.
So when Trump named the hollowed-out husk of a man that is RFK Jr. Secretary of Health and Human Services and said he was going to investigate what he deemed the autism crisis and deliver a blockbuster report, I was intrigued. By “intrigued” I mean “mortified”, particularly since pretty much everything that the black sheep of the Kennedy family said about the subject was insulting and ignorant.
A man who is somehow not the most hated member of the Trump administration portrayed autism as a tragedy that destroyed families, and was a new development that undoubtedly had environmental causes.
The boring truth of the matter is that while we do not know exactly what causes autism, it’s impossible to deny that it has a genetic component. I should know. If it’s not passed on, then it is a crazy coincidence that both of my children would turn out to be autistic.
There’s similarly a non-exciting explanation for why more people are being diagnosed with autism than ever before. It’s because awareness of autism has reached an all-time high, children are being tested and diagnosed more aggressively than in previous generations, and the medical definition of autism has broadened.
Autism is not a disease, so there is no cure. It’s a complex, challenging reality that affects everyone differently. That's why it’s called a spectrum.
That isn’t good enough for Trump, RFK Jr., and their cultists.
Until fairly recently, Kennedy Jr. was a Democratic environmentalist. Trump hates Democrats and the environment, but he shares with RFK’s shuddering embarrassment of a son an unshakable conviction that the establishment is inherently corrupt.
Trump sees the establishment as not just corrupt but also criminal, unethical, and wrong, because the establishment sees Trump as corrupt, criminal, unethical, and wrong.
The president sees our unfathomably complex political landscape through the prism of an ego so vast it threatens to block out the sun. Trump divides the world into winners and losers, patriots who support him and crazed, America-hating, far-left Marxist lunatics who would transform our country into a Max Max-style dystopia if given half a chance.
Trump’s desperate compulsion to see himself as a savior fixing a broken country and world leads him to prescribe “fixes” for pressing social problems that are often worse than the maladies they're supposed to cure.
The economy is a good example. The establishment angrily insisted that imposing stiff tariffs on goods from other countries and starting a trade war would harm the economy and hurt consumers and businesses by making everything more expensive.
Trump does not care. In his mind, he fixed the economy and has sadistically been denied credit for this incredible achievement by an evil establishment that resorts to faking numbers to cruelly deny him ultimate victory.
Trump sees autism as a problem to be fixed and a victory to be claimed. It's a problem that has a solution: avoid Tylenol if you're a mother, and take Leucovorin if you’ve got the Tism.
The fact that the establishment is skeptical of both the cause and the miracle cure for autism only makes them more appealing for Trump and RFK Jr.
Trump’s politics are both far-right-wing and incoherent, but they're rooted in conspiracy theories, and those are rooted in arrogance and paranoia.
They're rooted in arrogance, because they presuppose that the theorist has special, secret knowledge about, to throw out some random examples, Barack Obama being born in Kenya and a secret Muslim, Donald Trump winning a landslide victory in 2020, only to have his historic win ripped away from him by election-stealers, an autopen wielded by unknown conspirators performing a senile Joe Biden’ presidential duties, and the escalator in the UN building stopping while Trump was on it before his speech not due to random bad luck, or a blunder by Trump’s own team, but rather a sinister plot by the UN that must be investigated and punished.
Conspiracy theories are innately paranoid because they see, in the chaotic, random awfulness of real life, sinister schemes everywhere and generally assume that humanity is way more self-disciplined than it actually is.
The world is a nightmare, but we're nowhere near as organized and self-disciplined enough to carry out elaborate conspiracies.
Trump and RFK Jr. did not say that there was some evidence, albeit shaky, about a link between autism and acetaminophen, or that Leucovorin could potentially help with certain symptoms of autism.
Where’s the glory in that? Why acknowledge the complexity and difficulty of life on the autism spectrum when you can be a hero and prescribe a cause and a cure, pat yourself for solving yet another intractable problem, and then move on?
Trump doesn’t mess with the subtleties and nuances of reality. He prefers child-like hyperbole and fake certainty. So Trump, a man with no medical background or knowledge, repeated over and over that pregnant women should not take Tylenol, and that even if they're in excruciating pain, they should "tough it out”, whereas if you’re on an escalator and it stops unexpectedly, you should make an international incident out of it and angrily demand justice for being briefly inconvenienced.
The president thinks that he’s so smart and has such remarkable common sense and judgment that he can start throwing random suggestions about things he knows nothing about, like autism or COVID-19, and his words will be of more value than those of people who’ve spent their entire adult lives working in the field.
In Trump’s mind, he’s solved autism. There’s nothing more to it. If the entire autism community is unimpressed or disgusted, that just proves that they’re pawns to Big Pharma and the corrupt medical establishment and ungrateful to his administration for reducing an insanely complicated, multi-faceted issue affecting millions of lives to taking one pill and avoiding another.
Pregnant women have enough to worry about without being told that they unwittingly made their child autistic by taking something for a headache they were told was safe because it is safe.
I am the reason that my sons are autistic. It’s my DNA and my genetic material that led to both of my sons being on the spectrum. There’s nothing that I could have done about it. I wasn’t even diagnosed myself until a few years ago.
I feel guilt because of that, not because I think there’s anything wrong with being autistic, but rather because my sons’ lives will be more difficult because he’s neurodivergent. They’ll face obstacles and struggles that neurotypicals will never know. Life is hard enough, particularly in Trump’s America, without X factors that make it even more difficult.
It’s telling that Trump used the same aggressive phrasing to encourage pregnant women to avoid taking Tylenol that he did to inspire his cultists to protest what he depicted as Joe Biden's theft of the 2020 presidential election.
In both instances, Trump said that they must "fight like hell.” Those smug establishment fucks might tell you that the link between Tylenol and autism is sketchy, if not downright non-existent, but a man who, by his own account, is right about everything, insists that a cause-and-effect relationship exists. Establishment pricks might similarly insist that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, but Trump knows better. He will never concede that he lost, because in his mind, he's incapable of losing a presidential election or anything else.
Genuine intelligence, the kind that does not involve constantly insisting that you’re very smart, and have incredible common sense, and all of your opponents are low-IQ cretins, requires humility and curiosity.
Smart people, who, incidentally, don’t feel the need to broadcast their intelligence to the world, have the humility to understand that they don’t know everything and consequently have much to learn from others. So they seek out the counsel of people who’ve spent their entire lives obsessively studying their areas of expertise, like Dr. Fauci.
Trump possesses no humility. He is the antithesis of humble. During a speech at the United Nations, during which he lectured the rest of the world on how to run their countries (like ours under his reign), he boasted, “I’m really good at predicting things, you know? They actually said during the campaign, they had a hat. The best-selling hat. Trump was right about everything. And I don’t say that in a braggadocios way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything.”
No one can accuse Trump of having false humility because he clearly possesses no humility at all, false or otherwise.
The truly intelligent never stop learning. They're curious about everything and eager to expand their base of knowledge. They’re perpetual students of the world.
Trump behaves in a manner I find curious, if not incomprehensible, but he is not curious.
The president does not read books. He apparently doesn’t even read his intelligence briefings because, as he will be the first to tell you, over and over, to the point of madness, he's very smart, a “very stable genius.”
If you believe that you are already right about everything, then you have nothing to learn from others. You have nothing to learn, period. Trump is stubbornly committed to never learning anything because, in his mind, he has already achieved a state of intellectual perfection.
If there is a cure to autism, it involves years and years, if not decades, of expensive therapies, like speech and occupational therapy, and enrolling your child in schools and classes devoted to helping neurodivergent children succeed.
That’s what my wife and I have done. We sacrifice everything for our children. We eschew vacations and luxuries so that our children can have every opportunity to succeed. It’s working. They’re wonderful children who have made incredible progress, but that’s an exceedingly hard, expensive path filled with sacrifices and putting the needs of your children above your own. It's a lot easier to tell pregnant women not to take Tylenol than to put an invisible “Mission Accomplished” sign behind you in honor of your non-existent achievement.
If the government really wanted to help the autistic, it’d help pay for costly but necessary therapies and interventions that actually can improve the lives of the neurodivergent, but at a stiff cost.
Like everything he does, the press conference where RFK Jr. and Trump fixed autism had nothing to do with the people they were ostensibly helping and everything to do with helping their self-image as rebel saviors standing up to the evils of an inherently corrupt establishment.