After President Donald Trump used the word “retarded” recently, social media posts including the term tripled, fueling a trend that has disability advocates on edge.
A new report finds that a Thanksgiving post from Trump describing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as “seriously retarded” prompted a surge in use of the term, which many people with disabilities find offensive.
Posts containing the word “retard” on the social media platform X jumped 225.7% in the hours after Trump deployed it and a “high volume” of such posts persisted in the days following, researchers from Montclair State University found.
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Of the more than 1.1 million posts using the “r-word” in the seven days after Trump did, “the most viewed, liked, and shared content analyzed enthusiastically endorsed use of the r-word,” according to the report.
The spike propelled a rise in r-word use on X that first took off in earnest after Elon Musk used the term in a January post.
“It was inching up for quite some time, but the posts from Trump and Musk caused an absolute explosion in usage of the term,” said Bond Benton, a professor of communication at Montclair State University, who conducted the analysis along with Daniela Peterka-Benton, a professor of justice studies at the university.
By contrast, the report notes that in 2020 the r-word was “nearly unused” on X, which was known as Twitter at that time.
The uptick is deeply worrisome, disability advocates say.
“This resurgence represents a serious setback,” said Jonathan Schillace, senior director of marketing and communications at Special Olympics. “The normalization of the r-word undermines efforts to foster dignity and respect for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, contributes to a hostile environment online and offline, and makes inclusive advocacy even more challenging.”
From 2009 to 2019, Special Olympics’ “Spread the Word to End the Word” campaign urged people to abandon the r-word. The effort was so successful that the organization evolved its messaging in 2019 to focus on inclusion more generally rather than the r-word in particular, but that changed last year.
“In 2024, due to increased public and online use of the r-word, the campaign returned its focus specifically to stopping harmful language while continuing to encourage respect and understanding,” Schillace said.
The return of the r-word also has advocates concerned about broader implications, particularly in an environment where they’re seeing Medicaid cuts and other threats to disability rights.
“Throughout history, dehumanizing language has frequently served as the first step toward dismantling hard-won protections and rights. The words we normalize today directly shape the policies implemented tomorrow,” said Katy Neas, CEO of The Arc of the United States.
“When public figures casually use the r-word, they’re essentially giving permission for millions of others to do the same,” she said. “To break this cycle, we need to understand that language is the foundation that either reinforces discrimination or builds inclusion.”
