It is no longer possible to dismiss the policy trajectory of Donald Trump’s leadership across both his presidential terms as mere fiscal conservatism or bureaucratic streamlining. When viewed holistically, the pattern that emerges is far more disturbing and a sustained and deliberate deprioritization of the lives and well-being of the weak, the elderly, and the disabled, including disabled children.
We have moved past the point where this can be brushed aside as budget balancing. What we are witnessing is a governance philosophy with disturbing historical echoes, one that casts aside those deemed "unproductive" or "burdensome" in favor of a hollow ideal of strength, self-reliance, and ruthless efficiency. Is this what Americans really want in 2025?
In March 2025, the Trump administration announced significant cuts to the Social Security Administration, closing 47 field offices and laying off thousands of workers. SSA leadership has warned staff to expect degraded service, longer wait times, and processing delays. For those reliant on Social Security—especially the elderly and disabled—this isn't a minor inconvenience, it's an existential threat. These cuts follow earlier proposals from Trump's first term, which sought $45 billion in reductions to SSDI and SSI over ten years. Ostensibly targeting "waste," the changes imposed harsher eligibility reviews and more frequent re-evaluations, disproportionately affecting those with mental illness or invisible disabilities.
The Department of Health and Human Services was also gutted in early 2025, with 20,000 jobs eliminated. The administration framed it as necessary restructuring, but the consequences are immediate and far-reaching: diminished support for public health, slowed medical research, and jeopardized clinical trials for rare and chronic diseases.
Meanwhile, proposals to privatize Medicare and shift Medicaid to state block grants are back on the table, moves that would drastically reduce coverage and services, especially for low-income seniors and people with disabilities. These aren't abstractions. These are lifelines being cut.
The Trump administration's assault on education access for disabled children is equally alarming. The Department of Education has deprioritized enforcement of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and dozens of special education investigations have been quietly shelved. Project 2025, the policy roadmap championed by Trump-aligned think tanks, proposes eliminating the Department of Education altogether. Trump has subsequently issued an Executive Order to implement this closure, a move that would dismantle enforcement mechanisms for IDEA and leave compliance to under-resourced states.
What makes these decisions so alarming is that they are not presented as necessary evils or regrettable tradeoffs. They are framed as victories over "dependency," as steps toward a leaner, tougher America. Elon Musk, now an administration insider, has repeated unfounded claims of widespread Social Security fraud, fueling public skepticism and setting the stage for further cuts. The rhetorical subtext is unmistakable, suggesting that weakness is failure, and failure has no place in the Trumpist vision of the nation.
That vision is rooted not just in policy but in language. We remember the grotesque mocking of disabled journalist Serge Kovaleski in 2015, a moment that should have been disqualifying for any serious leader. But it was not an aberration. It was a signpost. Trump’s language, from dismissing critics as "low-IQ" to extolling the virtues of strength and toughness, draws a line between those worthy of respect and those worthy of ridicule. It is the same language used, subtly or overtly, to justify the abandonment of the elderly, the sick, and the disabled.
This worldview has a precedent. In Nazi Germany, the so-called T4 Program systematically murdered over 200,000 disabled people, adults and children alike, under the guise of mercy and economic necessity. They were labeled "useless eaters," stripped of their humanity for not contributing to the national ideal. The United States, too, has a dark legacy of forced sterilizations of disabled people under eugenics laws upheld by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927), with the chilling declaration, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
While we are not yet witnessing those atrocities here in 2025, we are witnessing a government that echoes their logic. When access to benefits is systematically denied, when supports for disabled students are hollowed out, when the language of power and productivity becomes the measure of human worth, we are moving in a direction that history has already marked with tragedy.
This trajectory bears all the hallmarks of a precursor to eugenics. The slow, systemic erosion of rights and services for disabled and elderly individuals mirrors early steps taken by eugenics movements in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. What begins as administrative tightening or budgetary restraint too often morphs into social exclusion, loss of dignity, and in the worst cases, elimination.
We have seen how economic justifications can give way to moral rationalizations for cruelty. We must be clear-eyed. We must recognize these current policies may be paving the way for a modern form of eugenics, one not declared but deployed through neglect, stigma, and calculated indifference.
Dr. David Perry, a disability rights advocate and historian, has warned, "Eugenics is not just something from history books. It begins with policies that devalue disabled lives and ends with societies that erase them." Scholar and author Adam Cohen, whose book Imbeciles chronicles the Buck v. Bell case, reminds us that, "Once a government begins deciding who is fit to live based on productivity or cost, the descent into cruelty is rapid and often unnoticed until it is too late."
It is not enough to claim that these are economic decisions. Every budget is a moral document. Every line item reflects who we value and who we are willing to sacrifice. And in Trump’s America, the calculus is chillingly clear.
We see it in the gutting of public health infrastructure. We see it in the closure of SSA field offices that served rural and elderly Americans who cannot easily access digital services. We see it in the suspension of special education enforcement and the proposed dismantling of federal education oversight. And we see it in the rhetoric. Not just from Trump, but from his surrogates and policy architects that casts compassion as weakness and social programs as parasites on the body politic.
This is not efficiency. It is abandonment.
The question we must now ask ourselves is whether we accept this vision of America. A country that steps over the elderly in the name of self-reliance. A country that devalues disabled children because they challenge our test scores and budgets. A country that sees the weak not as fellow citizens deserving of dignity, but as liabilities to be managed.
Authoritarianism does not always come with jackboots. Sometimes it comes with spreadsheets, with rhetoric about trimming the fat, with the subtle reshaping of public morality to reward cruelty and stigmatize compassion. We have seen this before. And we are seeing it again.
If we still believe in the democratic republic ideals of liberty, equality, and mutual obligation then we must reject this trajectory. We must defend those who are being discarded. Because the measure of a society is not how it treats the powerful, but how it treats those who can offer it nothing but their presence.
We are all diminished when any among us is deemed disposable.
These are serious times. We need serious people to stand up and reject the transformation of our government into a machine of exclusion where strength is worshipped, weakness is punished, and human worth is measured by utility.
If we remain silent as these patterns unfold, we are not just abandoning the vulnerable, we are complicit in building a future where cruelty is policy and dignity is optional.
A PODCAST based on this editiorial is available here.
Disclaimer: Jim Powers writes Opinion Columns. The views expressed in this editorial are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Polk County Publishing or its affiliates. In the interest of transparency, I am politically Left Libertarian.
