Last Thanksgiving, while the rest of us were trying not to start a fight at the dinner table, President Trump started one on the internet. He took to Truth Social to call Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz “seriously retarded.” When a reporter later pointed out that many people consider the term a slur, Trump doubled down. “Yeah,” he said. “I think there’s something wrong with him.”
Soon, use of the R-word on X had tripled, according to research by two professors at Montclair State University. This is part of a pattern, study co-author Bond Benton told me. “The use of slurs in general is up,” he explained. “But nothing comes near the numbers we’re seeing on the R-word.”
The upswing actually kicked off 10 months before Trump’s Thanksgiving rant, when his frenemy Elon Musk responded to a critic on X by deploying the slur. That also caused its use on the platform to triple, according to an earlier report by Benton and his colleagues.