The White House used its “Rapid Response” X account to call a reporter a slur for people with Down syndrome alongside a now-viral clip of President Donald Trump snapping at the reporter in the Oval Office on Tuesday.

Andrew Feinberg, the White House correspondent for The Independent, had asked Trump several questions during the press gaggle. But it was when he asked Trump about his plans for a golf course at the East Potomac Park in Washington that Trump snapped at him.

“Wait a minute. Wait, wait. Quiet. Quiet!” Trump said to Feinberg. “What’s wrong with you? Are you a sick person?”

“Not that I know of, sir,” Feinberg replied.

“No, I actually think there’s something wrong with you,” Trump said.

Accompanying the clip, the Rapid Response account wrote, “@POTUS absolutely roasts Mongoloid Moron @AndrewFeinberg for his disgraceful behavior.”

.@POTUS absolutely roasts Mongoloid Moron @AndrewFeinberg for his disgraceful behavior:"What's wrong with you? Are you a sick person? I actually think there's something wrong with you." pic.twitter.com/DyMDGdmBSc

The White House did not respond to HuffPost’s question about who wrote the Rapid Response X post and did not respond to questions about the slur.

October has been designated Down Syndrome Awareness Month since the 1980s, which the White House acknowledged in a presidential message on Oct. 2.

Feinberg did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment, but published an article about the situation on Tuesday evening, arguing that Trump may not have realized he had called on Feinberg, so he objected when Feinberg spoke.

“For doing my job, I became the target of Trump and his team,” Feinberg wrote. “Soon after, Trump lectured me and unleashed at me his White House rapid response, who called me a ‘Mongoloid Moron’ — which is a slur for someone with developmental disabilities, a phrase I would never use — and the Vice President on his official government account labeled me an ‘imbecile.’”

According to Arizona State University’s Embryo Project Encyclopedia, “Mongoloid” is an obsolete medical term that comes from physician John Langdon Down associating characteristic facial features of people with Down syndrome with people from Mongolia.

David Perry, a historian and reporter who is the father of a 19-year-old son with Down syndrome, told HuffPost that Down’s coining of the term came during a moment in the development of evolutionary theory that categorized a lot of developmental disabilities by race.

“There are people who picked up this phrase ‘Mongoloid’ and suggested that people who had Down syndrome were somehow the throwback descendants of Caucasians raped by Mongols during the Mongol conquest of [the 13th and] 14th centur[ies],” Perry said. “It’s nonsense. But it’s in this bizarre and quite harmful, but mainstream, eugenic world of debates between ‘highly educated’ — mostly white European or American men — arguing about who was unfit.”

The World Health Organization dropped the term from official use in 1965 after genetic experts advocated for it to be abandoned because of its false racial connotations.

“The use of slurs such as ‘Mongoloid, moron, imbecile and r*****ed or r*****’ is painful to individuals with intellectual disability and their families and sets our movement back decades,” National Down Syndrome Congress executive director Jim Hudson said in a statement shared with HuffPost. “We implore people to stop using this derogatory language and treat people with Down syndrome and other disabilities with the respect and dignity they deserve.”

“The slur is concerning, not simply because it’s offensive, but also because it relies on these familiar narratives that have been historically used to dehumanize communities,” Sim Singh Attariwala, director of the Anti-Hate Program at Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAAJ), told HuffPost. “This doesn’t seem to be an isolated incident.”

This isn’t the first time the White House uses the term “Mongoloid Moron.”

White House communications director Steven Cheung, who is Chinese American, called Feinberg a “Mongoloid Moron” on X in March in response to Feinberg’s since-deleted post. HuffPost could not independently review the original post.

Attariwala also pointed to Trump using terms such as “Chinese virus” and “Kung Flu” during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

“Americans also remember the widely criticized incident in which the president mocked a reporter with a disability,” Attariwala said. “You have to look at this together when these events raise concerns about the broader pattern of rhetoric targeting vulnerable communities.”

The latter incident was when Trump appeared to mimic New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski during a campaign rally in South Carolina in November 2015. Kovaleski has a congenital joint condition, arthrogryposis. In response to the backlash, Trump claimed on Twitter he did not know Kovaleski had a disability, HuffPost reported at the time.

Perry told HuffPost he believes the Trump administration and MAGA movement have made it “increasingly common” to use “anti-disability slurs, typically the r-word,” in many ways since 2016 but more intensively during the second term.

The increase seems to have normalized overall usage of the slurs, too. The New York Times reported in January that a study by Montclair State University researchers found that the r-word slur appeared on X over 2,000 times a day in 2020. In 2026, it’s over 46,000 times a day.

“When I saw [the Rapid Response post], it was just another example of something that’s really upsetting and really bad,” Perry said. But “if I got really upset every time I saw a Republican use a disability slur, I would do nothing else.”

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