Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who is up for reelection in Maine, was hounded into “admitting” that she has an essential tremor, as if she had stolen from a children’s charity or failed to disclose her side hustle in heroin. Then came the online high-fives and bows over the successful bullying campaign.
The New York Times said she talked about her ET for the first time “amid mounting online scrutiny – pushed in particular on the left – of the shakiness that is often detectable when Ms. Collins speaks, and questions about whether it has worsened with time.”
“You may not like my approach, but it gets results,” bragged independent journalist Ken Klippenstein on X. He does investigative reporting that I often admire. But the “approach” he refers to in this case includes his X post that said, “Here’s 73-year-old Susan Collins vibrating like an electric toothbrush in her reelection campaign commercial.”
Couldn’t we let cruelty be MAGA’s thing?
As always, the mob was excited: “Honestly, this should be criminal. Hiding something like this from voters is beyond wrong,” one of his followers responded. “She should be getting treatment at home,” said another. “Not sitting in Congress.”
That’s a complete misunderstanding of this condition. Yet now, Klippenstein has doubled down, in a Substack piece that says, “I’d like to apologize for that” electric toothbrush remark. “On reflection, she shakes more like a chihuahua in the snow.” He accuses the media of soft-pedaling this deadly condition and goes on to give a completely hysterical account of what an essential tremor is and does, linking it to a 300% increased risk of dementia and a 200% increased risk of death, with 85% reporting “functional disability.” There’s an increased risk of dementia from Benadryl, too. The ET studies, conducted on the elderly, all indicate that more research is needed to establish causation. Could the percentage of those reporting “functional disability” have something to do with insurance that requires some level of disability for coverage of treatments?
I have an essential tremor, too – have had since my 20s – and the worst thing it has ever kept me from doing is getting a cup of tea to my mouth without spilling it while interviewing a 98-year-old WWII veteran two years ago. I hated that in particular because she’d gone to great trouble to serve it.
But it is a very common condition, not the shame of the nation or something anyone can hide. And though I rarely agree with Collins, how ugly and Trump-like to try to turn her tremor into a cudgel.
It’s just ableism, rather than some great victory, to get Collins to acknowledge that her hands, head, and voice shake. Anyone who has seen her speak already knew that.
Maybe it would have been politically savvy for her to have given the public a PSA tutorial before now, if only to dispel the general ignorance about this condition. But it’s ridiculous to suggest she was cloaking some awful secret.
And why would anyone want to emulate Donald Trump in this way?
Were we not all thinking of some smart person we know who has dyslexia when he called California Gov. Gavin Newsom “mentally disabled?”
Were we not all horrified when he mocked the incredibly able Pulitzer- and Polk-winning journalist Serge Kovaleski? (If you think I’m only reflexively praising his skill, read his final tour de force for The New York Times, which told the story of Unabomber’s brother, who turned him in but never gave up on reconciling with him.)
Did we not think Trump was the small one when he informed a little girl visiting the Oval Office just last week that she was too short to do well in volleyball? (“And with your height, do you smash the volleyball? Can you get up high? Can you jump high?”)
That the president regularly diminishes his office by spraying crowds with f-bombs and mocking people for their looks and supposedly “low IQ” should make us run in the opposite direction. We all have physical infirmities; it’s part of being human.
So yes, I similarly hated it when Democratic Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett called Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, “Governor Hot Wheels.” She said that was a reference to his immigration policies, which in my mind are odious, but that explanation was a crock.
My first-grade teacher, Sister Mary Edna, got my attention when she told our class the terrifying tale of the boy who was making fun of someone with a disability, and his little face and arm froze in that position for the rest of his life. Of course, that young mister never existed, yet I’ve had reason to remember him over the years. Edna, if only you had been around to scare Donald and his imitators.
I know a couple of other people who have an essential tremor, and though I wouldn’t say it’s no big whoop, because it is annoying, it’s not a defining whoop.
One is my friend Joel Goldman, a Kansas City lawyer turned novelist, who, though he disagrees with Collins politically, also sees the way she was treated as “terrible.”
“I have ET,” he said. “It’s part of my daily life. All the people who see me see it, and it’s of no consequence. All of those criticizing her for not disclosing it don’t understand how difficult it is for some not to be self-conscious about it.”
Goldman also has a dystonic tic disorder, and when he first started telling colleagues about that more than 20 years ago, “it was very liberating.”
“If I’m with someone and I have a spasm or shaking, I explain and it puts people at ease,” he told me. “Of course, I’m so good-looking it wouldn’t matter what I was doing. (He urged me to be sure and say that he’s also very humble.) But when you’re open about things, you give your community a chance to support you, and I would just say to Sen. Collins that I hope she has a similar experience.”
I do, too. I happen to hope she has that experience out of office, but this was no way to go after her. If I were advising Graham Platner, the Democrat running against Collins, I would urge him to tell those attacking his rival on this basis to knock it off.
