‘Good’ genes and ‘sick people’: Trump’s warped views on eugenics
We don’t talk nearly enough about one aspect of the president's white supremacist mindset: his apparent belief that certain races and groups of people are genetically inferior.
It’s hardly a newsflash that President Donald Trump is a bigot, but we don’t talk nearly enough about another part of his white supremacist mindset that is just as concerning: his disturbing views on eugenics.
Trump recently called into The Brian Kilmeade Show on Fox and babbled about the genetic makeup of two different terror suspects — one from Sierra Leone and the other from Lebanon.
But instead of focusing on the horrors around what happened earlier this month, he made it about their genetics.
“They’re sick people and, uh, a lot of them were let in here; they shouldn’t have been let in,” the president told Kilmeade. “Others, they’re just bad, they go bad. Something wrong, there’s something wrong there.” He added, ”The genetics are not exactly — uh, they’re not exactly your genetic.”
Trump’s espousing eugenics to demonize immigrants is nothing new. Throughout history, people have attempted to use the debunked theory that certain races and groups of people are inferior to justify slavery, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, and forced sterilizations, among other atrocities. The term itself doesn’t get tossed around as much these days because of its association with Nazis, but the assumptions behind it linger.
But Trump — who often uses transparent code words like blood and genes — doesn’t try to hide how he feels about racialism. Earlier this month, Trump told an audience in Kentucky about an uncle who had been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for many years and concluded, “That means I have much better blood.” Better than whose? That’s the operative question.
“He’s not even really dog whistling it any longer,” Shannon Bow O’Brien, author of Eugenics in American Public Life: How the Politics of Superiority Still Shape Us Today, told me. “It’s open, and it’s overt. He believes that he is superior.”
It’s galling when you think about how he puts down the intelligence of people like former President Barack Obama, as he did on Thursday during a cabinet meeting, claiming the nation’s first Black president “wasn’t a smart man.”
Trump did the same thing with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whom he has called “stupid” and said, “I don’t want a person with mental disability to be my president.” In other words, Trump is claiming Newsom is genetically inferior.
We’ve heard this kind of ableist language from him before. Trump should have been disqualified for the presidency back in 2015 after he famously mocked New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski for having a physical disability. Instead, it was a harbinger of things to come.
In 2024, Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt that undocumented immigrants were bringing “bad genes” into the country. The previous year, he accused them of “poisoning the blood of our country.”
But then there was the time in 2020 when he praised a mostly white audience in Minnesota, saying: “You have good genes. You know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”
Meanwhile, we’ve heard him refer to Somali Americans quite differently. “In Minnesota, it’s very Somalia-oriented. These people come from a crooked country, disgusting country, one of the worst countries in the world. They come to our country — low IQs — and they rob us blind. Stupid people, and they rob us blind.”
Given the president’s track record of crude and boorish behavior, it’s tempting for some people to chalk all of this up to “Trump being Trump.” But as an African American whose ancestors suffered greatly because of the widespread promulgation of white superiority, his remarks land differently with me — and I hope they do with anyone who cares about things like equality, civility, fairness, and the rule of law.
And if more evidence is needed that these are not just harmless Trumpisms, we don’t have to look any further than the destruction of DEI initiatives or the attempts to whitewash the history of slavery and Jim Crow from national parks and museums to see how his caustic and divisive views shape public policy.
As O’Brien noted, it’s open, it’s overt — and it’s crucial that Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court block Trump from allowing his flawed reasoning to come up with more policies that set America even further back.