Im in the disability field and honestly I feel like we need something and need it bad. Not institutions, at least not like they were, but I honestly wouldn’t be surprised to see some people in the disability community respond positively to this with the hopes that its different this time, lord know the people who like him don’t believe his words at face value. I can also tell you thers definitely is a not insignificant amount of people in the community who have a neutral to faborable feeling on Trump.
The key here I think is that during the pandemic, even before mask mandates, we started seeing services get cut, orgs defunded, and staff reduced. So much of the disability community right now is relying on support staff and self directed program funding, which is essentially the disbursement of medicare and medicaid funding to one individual, not necessary with a medical background, to help the person with the disability with their day to day stuff and goals stated in their Individual Service Plan. The flexibility is great but its just one person at a time, they don’t even get a budget to do things typically.
A lot of people with disabilities are missing the structure of actual organizations that has the resources to do more than what a one on one support worker can, and someone on Trumps team is either smart enough to know that, or quite lucky.