As A Mom To A Son With Rare Diseases, Here’s What I Think About Trump’s Alleged Comments About People With Disabilities

Donald Trump’s nephew Fred Trump III alleges in a new book, excerpted for Time magazine, that in a private conversation about people with disabilities who require expensive care, his uncle said, “Maybe those kinds of people should just die.”

Donald Trump allegedly made a similar statement when discussing Fred Trump III’s own son, who has a KCNQ2 gene mutation that resulted in intellectual and developmental disabilities. The nephew writes that he was appalled by his uncle’s remarks and the implication that there is a whole group of people whose lives don’t matter. If it’s true that Donald Trump made these statements, I am appalled as well — partly because my 6-year-old son is one of those people.

When I read the Time article, I was sitting in a hospital room in Washington, D.C., where I was helping my son recover from an expensive and scary health situation. After a scheduled major surgery, he kept having fevers and pain during his expected recovery days at the hospital. My spouse, Mark, and I were very worried. Like other parents, we want our child to be well.

We kept speaking up about his pain, and after various diagnostics, members of the medical team determined that my son had a postsurgery leak into his stomach that could have led to life-threatening sepsis. They created a treatment plan, and thankfully he is nearing the end of his recovery at the hospital. I am so relieved he will be OK.

Worrying about his health is not new to me, however. My son has five health conditions, and four of them are considered rare, because they affect fewer than 200,000 Americans. With rare conditions, the necessary specialists, treatment plans and unexpected complications can be very expensive. My son is tracked by three specialists,