Trump’s Obsession With Autism, and How Americans May Die as a Result

Listen To This Story

Of all the things for the president of the world’s most powerful country to worry about, Donald Trump spends an amazing amount of time opining about the alleged, and unproven, harm that vaccines do to us. (And no time at all on the harm done without vaccines — e.g., the now 2,777 confirmed cases of measles reported in the US.)

Like other topics about which he obsesses and posts late at night, it disappears and then reappears with no apparent explanation for his renewed bombast.

Now, I get it about Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is so deeply invested in this issue after having been wrong on it for so long. But why does Trump pursue this increasingly unpopular falsehood? One clue may lie in his assertions concerning autism.

According to The Washington Post,

“It’s a personal issue for him,” said one of the people, an administration official with knowledge of Trump’s comments. Trump has repeatedly invoked his own theories on the rise in autism, shaped by conversations with friends and advocates. Trump has previously said that he and his wife, first lady Melania Trump, deliberately spaced out childhood vaccines for their 20-year-old son, Barron.

But this is not simply a Kennedy obsession that Trump has adopted. Trump has been making the vaccine-autism connection himself for nearly two decades.

Trump’s Mysterious Obsession With Autism

Trump of course is a serial, even epic, liar, and he has lied about various aspects of various vaccines — but more so when it comes to autism. In 2015, he said:

People that work for me, just the other day, two years old, beautiful child went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later, got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.

I wondered why he had these beliefs. And then I discovered that he didn’t always. His views apparently changed in 2007, the first year I could find him ranting against vaccines.

So, why 2007?

I can’t read his mind, of course (nor would I want to), but there’s a curious temporal coincidence that might explain Trump’s fixation on the “harm” caused by vaccination: On March 20, 2006, his son Barron was born. By the next year, Trump was fulminating about vaccines causing babies to be born with various problems — including autism.

“When I was growing up, autism wasn’t really a factor,” he told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in a 2007 interview. “And now all of a sudden, it’s an epidemic. Everybody has their theory. My theory, and I study it because I have young children, my theory is the shots. We’re giving these massive injections at one time, and I really think it does something to the children.”

Seventeen years later, Trump echoed that opinion in a leaked conversation. On July 14, 2024, one day after an assassination attempt on his life, Trump called Kennedy, whose son recorded the call, posted it on the social media platform X without permission, then took it down immediately.

The following quote is from that conversation: “When you feed a baby, Bobby, a vaccination that is like 38 different vaccines, and it looks like it’s meant for a horse not a 10-pound or 20-pound baby. It looks like you should be giving a horse this [inaudible word]. And did you ever see the size of this? You know it’s this massive — and then you see the baby all of a sudden begin to change radically. I’ve seen it too many times. And then you hear that it doesn’t have an impact, right?”

Now, one wants to be careful about drawing connections — and to say anything about a young person still finding their way in the world, albeit with a lot of help — but Barron Trump has often been described as “atypical.”

If his father, who has been cruel about human imperfections (remember his vicious mockery of disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski), was unhappy dealing with a child possibly born with some impediments — and if that father was the kind of person who cannot accept the reality that such things happen, and therefore likes to blame others, and other causes — then, well, we have a pretty good reason for him to look for an excuse.

Like… vaccines.

On November 21, 2016, Rosie O’Donnell, who had criticized Trump back in 2006 for moral and business deficiencies, posted a tweet suggesting Barron was autistic. She explained that her own daughter has the condition, and so she is familiar with the symptoms. And she sent out a video that presumably showed Barron exhibiting such symptoms.

On January 10, 2017, Kennedy announced that Trump asked him to chair a “commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity.” Trump said they were “exploring the possibility of forming a committee on Autism, which affects many families; however no decisions have been made at this time.”

The vaccine issue and the constant false claims seemed to wane as the consequences of vaccine avoidance have mounted, with examples around measles, pertussis, and flu, and illnesses in the military, and as Kennedy has publicly backpedaled while continuing his anti-vaccine work at HHS.

But then, earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order that he says will, among other things, address rising autism rates. The order recommends that children receive vaccines for fewer diseases and that shots be spaced out among more doctor’s visits — claiming increased autism rates as the reason. (Experts say there is no such connection between autism and vaccinations, whether spaced out or not.)

Many more separate trips are going to be hard on parents and children, and vaccines for fewer diseases will likely result in even more deaths — all preventable.

And Trump, perhaps seeking metaphorically to expand what is known as the Overton Window (i.e., introducing previously unacceptable ideas into the mainstream), has done so literally by nominating Heidi Overton, who has long been critical of vaccines, to head the Food and Drug Administration — the agency in charge of approving vaccines.

***

In medieval times, biological warfare was primitive. The Mongols would catapult over their enemy’s wall the leaking, decomposing corpses of plague victims, spreading the disease in Europe. But in modern times, germ warfare is much more nuanced.

There are times when Donald J. Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. seem like unconscious, walking biological weapons themselves. Consider their effects:

• Spread of preventable highly contagious diseases (mostly of childhood), many of which can cause permanent damage, including death: measles, whooping cough (pertussis), chickenpox, mumps, influenza, rotavirus, hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) — a dangerous bacteria that can cause meningitis, pneumonia, and throat swelling.

• Spread of preventable diseases among adults, such as COVID-19, which has still not gone away; seasonal flu; diseases adults catch from children, such as measles, whooping cough, hepatitis A, and Hib (mentioned above); and mpox (“monkey pox”), which is slowly circulating again and now likely to become endemic to the US.

• Spread of preventable diseases among our armed forces — a threat to national security. (After Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made getting flu shots “optional,” nearly 300 people were sickened, some requiring hospitalization. Hegseth later restored the mandate.)

In a pathetic attempt to defend his policies on measles vaccines, Kennedy said the disease is a “global epidemic” — as if the problem is so big he should not be blamed for its spread in this country (and claimed falsely that we handle it better than other countries). In fact, because the disease is worldwide, that’s another reason children in this country should be vaccinated against it.

The second (possibly third) time he mentioned it, he again claimed we handle the disease better than any other country. But this time, he made this outrageous claim: “At [the] CDC we encourage people to get their measles vaccination, that’s the best way to prevent yourself from getting measles.”

As if he had never said the exact opposite.

Will the US be prepared when contagious diseases from the rest of the world — such as HIV did — find their way to this country, greatly adding to cases already in the US? The Trump administration has reduced, and in some cases, stopped funding for HIV vaccinations.

And how might we deal with Ebola, should it become necessary? Ebola, or “blood fever,” is a ghastly disease, the description of which seems like an invention of Edgar Allan Poe. Victims even bleed from their eyes. Presumably, we have a few centers equipped to treat it. Also, presumably, it is spread only through direct transmission of body fluids, but some experts suspect it can potentially be transmitted by airborne droplets. In any case, it is “growing exponentially” in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with 2,500 dead and rising, according to the UN.

While no leaking corpses of its victims have been catapulted into the US, a few living victims have entered the country by plane, sitting next to unsuspecting passengers. They were discovered, and treated appropriately — but we are barely dealing with the health crises we already have. Consider these headlines: ‘Anti-science bills hit statehouses, stripping away public health protections built over a century’; ‘Undermining Public Health: The Consequences of RFK Jr.’s Agenda.’

Finally, as Trump continues to infuriate the world, creating contempt for Americans everywhere, will our enemies find a way to introduce even more virulent diseases into our now severely unprepared country?

This dangerous state of affairs may be one of Trump’s most lasting legacies, having a profound and enduring impact on the US population, its well-being, and even its national security. It stands to touch virtually every family in some irreversible way.