President Donald Trump points to reporters during a White House event announcing the $25 million Fraud Whistle Blower Incentive Program with the Department of Justice on October 20, 2026.Andrew Harnik/Getty
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After President Donald Trump snapped at a reporter multiple times during a Tuesday press conference, questioning whether he was “a sick person,” an official White House social media account posted a slur used against people with Down syndrome to describe the reporter.
“What’s wrong with you? Are you a sick person?” Trump pointedly asked Andrew Feinberg, the Independent’s White House correspondent. “I actually think there’s something wrong with you.”
The president made the remark after Feinberg began to ask about his plans to close down a historic Washington, DC, golf course for 15 months in a remodeling project to make a facility capable of hosting international competitions. Previously, Trump grew visibly frustrated when Feinberg asked him about his Fraud Whistleblower Incentive Program, which will give individuals a one percent of the monetary amount of fraud their tip helps uncover with a cap of $30,000.
“The False Claims Act, which has been on the books since 1863, whistleblowers can get between 10 and 25%,” Feinberg said. “Why would someone who has evidence of genuine fraud go to—”
“Because it’s a lot of money,” Trump interrupted. “And because when they did that, that’s a certain type of crime. But nobody ever thought that you could have stolen $2 trillion or whatever the ultimate number is going to be. And at 1 percent, people will make millions and millions of dollars for turning in what actually is a somewhat routine crime.”
That day, the Trump administration, which has made an effort to change the definition of “fraud” to benefit itself, awarded right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley $10,000 for his unsubstantiated videos that accelerated the federal government’s attacks on child care in blue states.
Vice President JD Vance, who serves as the chair of Trump’s fraud elimination task force, labeled Feinberg’s question as “fundamentally dishonest” and said the False Claims Act has narrow eligibility. He later called Feinberg an “imbecile” on social media, another insult describing people with intellectual disabilities.
“The use of slurs such as ‘Mongoloid, moron, imbecile and retarded or retard’ is painful to individuals with intellectual disability and their families and sets our movement back decades,” Jim Hudson, executive director of the National Down Syndrome Congress, said in a public statement Wednesday. “We implore people to stop using this derogatory language and treat people with Down syndrome and other disabilities with the respect and dignity they deserve.”
As my colleague Julia Métraux wrote last May, the Trump administration’s use of slurs falls into a pattern of ableist and eugenicist views the president has expressed for decades—from favoring people with “good genes” to saying that people with complex disabilities should “just die.”