On the evening before Thanksgiving, the president of the United States took to his social media platform to claim in a lengthy screed that immigration was destroying the country. In one spurious example Donald Trump offered in his Truth Social post, he warned, falsely, that “hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia” were “completely taking over the state” of Minnesota, with dangerous migrant gangs roving the streets as citizens cowered in fear at home.
Trump laid the blame squarely on Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic Party’s 2024 nominee for vice president. “The seriously retarded Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both,” Trump fumed.
In the not-too-recent past, it would have been unthinkable for a president to attack his political opponent using a derogatory term for people with intellectual disabilities. Even a Republican, Indiana State Sen. Mike Bohacek, rebuked Trump for his language in a Facebook post, saying it was reason enough to oppose a GOP-favored redistricting measure in his state. “I have been an unapologetic advocate for people with intellectual disabilities since the birth of my second daughter,” who has Down syndrome, he wrote, noting that Trump’s “choices of words have consequences.” (Trump, naturally, doubled down on his statement days later.)
The president’s epithet didn’t come out of thin air. Across the internet, during the 2024 election and in the first year of his second term, MAGA influencers have increasingly used the R-word to insult and scandalize conscientious “woke” liberals, normalizing a slur that had been largely purged from the national vocabulary. The trend reflects not only a coarsening of public discourse under Trump but new depths of callousness and cruelty in America, with disability advocates warning of the term’s dehumanizing effect. Elon Musk alone has dropped the word more than 30 times on his X account since early 2024, while Joe Rogan has said that its return represents an important win for right-wingers. “The word ‘retarded’ is back, and it’s one of the great culture victories,” the podcaster crowed in an April episode of his show.
Luvell Anderson, head of the philosophy department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has written extensively on the lexical category of slurs. He describes the Trumpworld’s pushback against the elimination of the R-word as part of the larger project of asserting ideology. “The attempted reintroduction of ‘retarded’ into the public language by people on the far right has less to do with changing meaning and more to do with an attempted shift in values,” he explains. “From the far right’s perspective, reintroducing a word we are taught not to say is a rebellious act meant to take back power. Open defiance is a clear sign that the old gatekeepers are no longer in charge.”
So, how exactly did we get here? To understand that, we have to chart the history and evolution of this troublesome term over hundreds of years.
Neutral and Clinical Origins
“Retard” is a verb derived from the Latin verb “retardere,” meaning “to make slow,” or “to delay.” To hinder something or someone’s progress is to “retard” it. “Retarded” is a corresponding adjective referring to whomever or whatever has been slowed down, and “retardant” describes that which is capable of inhibiting in this way: a “flame retardant” substance, for example, helps to reduce or halt the spread of fire. English and other languages included versions of these words as far back as the 15th century.
By the 19th century, clinical psychologists were applying old words such as “idiot” and “imbecile” to categorize people with intellectual disabilities, and sometimes inventing new ones. (In 1910, the American eugenicist Henry H. Goddard coined the term “moron,” suggesting it as a replacement for the description “feeble-minded,” which he found too vague for his liking.) To receive one of these designations from a doctor in this era was to be marked as unfit for society and a candidate for potential institution and sterilization.
As those words were adopted for epithets of abuse outside clinical settings, some in the medical community sought to move toward less loaded language. The first known use of “retarded” to characterize the intellectually disabled dates to 1895, with “mental retardation” slowly but surely replacing the previous terminology in medical literature over the course of the 20th century. This was reflected in the names of advocacy groups, including the National Association for Retarded Children and the American Association on Mental Retardation, which have since been renamed (as Arc of the United States and the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, respectively) in recognition of the rise in the harmful use of “retard” as a slur. But “retarded” did remain accepted scientific language into the 1980s and 1990s.
John McWhorter, an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University who examined profanity and slurs in his 2021 book Nine Nasty Words, says that the R-word was partially meant to be a neutralizing solution to words like “imbecile” becoming offensive slang. “My sense is that ‘moron’ and ‘idiot’ were the ones shelved for the more euphemistic ‘retarded,’ which originally would have felt like just ‘slowed down by factors beyond their control,’” he tells Rolling Stone. “But once ‘retarded’ felt like ‘moron,’ we started using terms like ‘special needs’ — and note what that term is starting to feel like in public discourse.”
A Stigmatizing Pejorative
The issue with simply switching from something like “idiot” to the R-word, McWhorter explains, is that the replacement term enters a “euphemism treadmill” and will eventually acquire the stigma of the last word.
“A word takes on unpleasant associations,” he says. “Those who wish to use a word with fewer associations, such as to protect a group of people, suggest a new term. Problem is, that term after a while takes on the same associations. ‘Bum’ is changed to ‘homeless,’ but when ‘homeless’ feels as mean as ‘bum,’ we change it to ‘unhoused’ — but that term will soon feel the same way.” There has been a similar progression, McWhorter notes, from “crippled” to “handicapped” to “disabled.”
As such, the R-word gained traction as a slang put-down through the middle of the 20th century, almost as soon as it was default medical terminology, and by the 1970s, disability activists were campaigning to retire the word. (It is probably no coincidence that Musk and Rogan, two outspoken fans of the epithet, are Gen Xers who were born right around a time when popular culture had fully embraced it for bullying purposes.)
Anderson says that what happened with the R-word is hardly unique. “The process of words moving from neutral to pejorative is called pejoration,” he explains. “This happens all the time. For example, it also happened with ‘idiot’ and ‘feeble-minded,’ both terms that were used in a neutral way but then shifted to something more negative. ‘Negro’ is another term that comes to mind that has gone through this process.”
“The status and meaning of expressions has much to do with shifting language ideologies,” Anderson adds, reflecting the values, morals, and politics of a social world. “Often, we come to feel positively or negatively about an expression, or expect words to be used in specific contexts and ways because of language ideologies.” That the R-word came to serve as a common disparagement for people who are not intellectually disabled revealed a societal lack of empathy and care for those who are.
Activist Campaign Leads to Change in Laws
In 2009, the U.S. saw a renewed call to force the R-word out of circulation: youth activists working with the Special Olympics launched a campaign called Spread the Word to End the Word to mark that year’s winter games. Students across the country were encouraged to sign a pledge to stop their derogatory use of the term. (Eventually, the campaign expanded into a general movement for inclusion and celebration of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.)
The following year, Rahm Emanuel, then White House chief of staff under President Obama, was embroiled in a scandal when it emerged that he had used the term in a private meeting the previous summer. He apologized to a number of disability rights activists, including Special Olympics Chief Executive Tim Shriver, and said he would not only take the Spread the Word to End the Word pledge but ensure that the Obama administration would work with the organization on efforts to remove the R-word from the text of federal laws.
In October 2010, Obama signed legislation to that effect. The measure, known as Rosa’s Law, was named for Rosa Marcellino, a nine-year-old with Down syndrome who along with her parents successfully fought to remove the term “mental retardation” from health and education records in her home state of Maryland. The federal law likewise amended government documentation, removing “mental retardation” and “mentally retarded” in favor of “intellectual disability” and “individual with an intellectual disability.” Several states had already begun making this revision, as had bureaucratic agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
All told, it seemed as if the world was moving on from a term that had fully transformed into a harmful slur. There were signs, however, that some would not be giving it up. After a 2012 presidential debate, right-wing commentator Ann Coulter called Obama a “retard” on Twitter, sparking outrage and demands for a public apology from disability activists. Coulter doubled down on her remarks in a CNN interview. “I was not referring to someone with Down syndrome. I was referring to the president of the United States,” she said, explaining that she viewed the word as a synonym for “loser.”
“Do you call people with mental disabilities retards?” she asked. “Because I don’t. I think that’s a nasty thing to do.”
Culture War Comeback
Trump’s 2016 presidential run brought moments of shocking incivility from the insurgent candidate. Almost a year after he took a moment at a South Carolina rally to perform a mocking impression of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has the congenital joint condition arthrogryposis, a poll found that voters still judged it his most offensive moment on the campaign trail. While in office, Trump regularly lobbed profanities, apparently regarding them as a natural element of his populist appeal.
It was not until 2024, however — during an election that saw Trump relentlessly attack Joe Biden as a president in steep cognitive decline — that MAGA culture warriors made a concerted effort to revive the term as a standard verbal jab. They were aided in this by Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter, which he rebranded as X and stripped of various moderation policies, reinstating extremists, conspiracy theorists, and peddlers of misinformation who had been banned under those guidelines. He began using the R-word himself on the platform and engaging with like-minded users, including an anonymous far-right “Retard Finder” profile based in Australia that appends the slur to pictures of U.S. liberals and Democrats. (The account was opened in December 2024 and now has more than 800,000 followers.)
In January, researchers at Montclair State University tracked the use of the R-word in the days after Musk responded “F u retard” to a Finnish researcher who posted on X that month that he was “rapidly becoming the largest spreader of disinformation in human history.” They demonstrated a more than 200 percent spike in posts containing the word over the following two days — 312,642 examples in all.
But it wasn’t just Musk driving these trends, according to the study’s authors. “While it might be tempting to view an event such as this as an isolated one-off, indications are that the widespread dissemination of hateful and marginalizing content may be an increasingly prominent feature on social media,” they wrote, observing that Facebook parent Meta had recently dismantled some of its safeguards against dehumanizing language, apparently in concession to the political climate about to be ushered in with a second Trump term.
This week, the paper’s co-authors — Bond Benton, a communications professor, and justice studies professor Daniela Peterka-Benton — released new findings that showed a sharp rise in use of the R-word on X in the days after Trump applied it to Walz. The effect was quite similar to the trend they identified in the wake of Musk’s January R-word post: a 225.7 percent increase in usage, or 1.12 million R-word posts in the week following Trump’s Truth Social diatribe.
“A lot of people face similar stressors in society right now, from cultural challenges to economic challenges to perceptions that they’re being marginalized in some way,” Benton tells Rolling Stone. “When you can say a word that you know is going to be hurtful to a lot of people, there could be a sort of power in that: you go from being vulnerable to being perceived as dangerous.” Benton believes right-wingers may be seeking “validation” by making others angry in this way. He also points out that this slur is surging in popularity at the same time that MAGA figures “are saying that the cost of compassion has hurt our country.” It may be no coincidence that they’re specifically marginizaling a group that relies on the social safety nets they want to do away with.
“Not using the R-word has sort of become synonymous with ‘wokeness,’” observes Peterka-Benton. Using it today, she says, is about “regaining the power to decide” what can be said publicly while “completely disregarding the harm that has been done to the disability community.” Peterka-Benton adds that heated discourse around such slurs can also act as “a diversion from bigger problems, from economic inequality to lingering questions about Trump’s ties to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And, she says, as with the demonization of undocumented migrants, to keep repeating the R-word means “being the bullies in the room against against populations that are inherently not as strong as the mainstream.”
Whatever its ideological value to the far right, though, the R-world may also simply be a way of compensating for the Trump administration’s failure to deliver on key promises. Grocery prices are up, limited disclosures about Epstein haven’t led to prosecutions of Democrats, the county is inching toward a mad war with Venezuela, and millions are set to lose Medicaid coverage — but you are free to throw the word “retarded” around online. As one X user summarized recent polling data that shows Trump’s disapproval rating has topped 60 percent: “You wanted a return to 2019 America but all you got is the r-word pass.” And it’s already looking as if that wasn’t quite the deal of a lifetime.
www.rollingstone.com
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