Eugenics: Towards Trump’s Superior Race
As the upcoming Trump presidency promises the deportation of 13 million migrants, one is mindful of some accusations Trump made on the campaign trail.
“You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes,” Trump said this month on the Hugh Hewitt radio show, amid one rant against immigrants, by far the most popular target of hate for his fans. “And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” he added.
“We’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now” is just the latest eugenics comment the former president has made over the years.
In December 2023, at a New Hampshire campaign stop, he warned that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Four years ago, he told a lily-white crowd of Minnesotans, “You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes. Don’t you believe?” 1
In January 2018, then-President Trump complained about "having all these people from shithole countries come here" — and singled out Haiti, El Salvador, and Africa as examples — he also added that "we should have more people from Norway." 2
Trump’s sentiments are not new; he “also has a history of statements suggesting that certain people are genetically superior. A 2016 documentary pointed out that Trump’s father, Fred, introduced him to “racehorse theory” as a child — the idea that “that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get superior offspring.” He’s used this idea to promote his intelligence as well. “I had an uncle who went to MIT, a top professor, Dr. John Trump, a genius. It’s in my blood. I’m smart,” he told CNN in 2020. 3
What is surprising is the nonchalant response when Trump talks about migrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” “I wasn’t surprised that people are being demagogic about this stuff, but I am a little surprised that they’re so clearly not even hiding [it],” said Paul Lombardo, a professor of law at Georgia State University who has done extensive work on the legacy of eugenics. “This is not just saying the quiet part out loud. This is coming up with quotations in which, instead of using quotation marks, you’ve got swastikas at each end of the sentence.” 4
According to a survey published by STAT, respondents who agree that migrants are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S. break down along ideological lines. Of those who agree, 61% are Republicans, 13% are Democrats, and 30% are independents. 5
One reason for the high percentage of Republicans who believe in the poisoning the blood theory is the media’s steady diet of coverage—the atrocities committed by a relatively small number of murderers of young Caucasian women by undocumented migrants. Not to minimize the horrendous nature of the murders of young women, but does that represent the 13 million Trump wants to deport? Most migrants pay taxes and fit into American communities. They work jobs in construction and agriculture, supplementing areas of acute labor shortages. And, no, Haitians are not eating your pets in Springfield, Illinois.
When one considers eugenics, one thinks of forced sterilization, marriage restrictions, segregation of populations, immigration restrictions, and, in extreme cases, genocide. One considers the Holocaust and the extermination of six million Jews. In the United States, some of these measures have taken place. The most obvious is the population of Native Americans, which incurred forced sterilization and relocation, “The Trail of Tears.” Trump likes to refer to Operation Wetback, which was in 1954 deported when an estimated 1.3 million migrants.
An important fact of history is that Nazi Germany first detained Jews. It then tried to deport them to other countries. When other countries refused to accept them, including the United States, the Nazi generals devised the “Final Solution.”
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime referred to people who were not part of what they considered the “Aryan race” as “Untermenschen,” which translates to “subhumans” in German. The term dehumanized and justified the persecution and extermination of various groups.
Eugenics is not a fringe movement. Starting in the late 1800s, leaders and intellectuals worldwide perpetuated eugenic beliefs and policies based on common racist and xenophobic attitudes. Many of these beliefs and policies still exist in the United States. Science and technology have added complexity in defusing eugenics beliefs.
Scientific racism is an ideology that appropriates the methods and legitimacy of science to argue for the superiority of white Europeans and the inferiority of non-white people whose social and economic status have been historically marginalized.
Like eugenics, scientific racism grew out of the misappropriation of revolutionary advances in medicine, anatomy, and statistics during the 18th and 19th centuries. These included Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through the mechanism of natural selection and Gregor Mendel’s laws of inheritance.6
Eugenic theories and scientific racism drew support from contemporary xenophobia, antisemitism, sexism, colonialism, and imperialism, as well as justifications for slavery, particularly in the United States and South Africa under apartheid.
According to an article by Sheila Kaplin at Berkeley Public Health, there is an effort to address the current confluence of scientific advances and eugenics from an ethical perspective:
Few today overtly subscribe to eugenics theories. But to Osagie K. Obasogie, a professor of law and bioethics at UC Berkeley, the discredited theory that selective breeding can—and should—be used to improve the human race lives on in hidden but insidious ways. He wants to bring those ideas in science and medicine out of hiding in a national conversation that will prevent the repetition of the past.
“Few people today will call themselves eugenicists,” said Obasogie, Haas Distinguished Chair and law professor; he also holds a joint appointment at the School of Public Health and the UC Berkeley/UCSF Joint Medical Program. “However, it’s not uncommon for mainstream scientists to embrace some of the ideas, ideologies, and practices that would be imminently familiar to a eugenicist of the past.”
Reproductive technologies that purport to help parents select embryos with particular traits concerning, for example, hair or eye color, or create children who might excel at music or sports, might align with eugenic thinking in ways that people might not immediately realize, Obasogie says. He believes that such technology must be scrutinized from both a scientific and ethical perspective to avoid the terrible racism and classism that defined eugenics from its founding.
“This idea has been around for a long time,” he said. “It’s been incredibly harmful, and we must maintain our historical commitment to resisting this thinking.7
1) Caplan, A., Tabrey, J., Donald Trump Wants to Make Eugenics Great Again. Let’s Not, Scientific American, October 17, 2024
2) Aizenman, N., Trump Wishes We Had More Immigrants from Norway. Turns Out We Once Did, NPR, January 18, 2018 https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/01/12/577673191/trump-wishes-we-had-more-immigrants-from-norway-turns-out-we-once-did
3) The Choice 2016 Frontline, PBS, September 27, 2016, https://youtu.be/s7uScWHcTzk?si=VhFL7KyDb9JumjWO
4) Oza, A. Trump's talk of 'bad genes' is rooted in eugenics. Experts explain why it's making a comeback, STAT, October 28, 2024
5) Ibid
6) National Human Genome Institute, Eugenics, and Scientific Racism https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism
7) Kaplan, S., The Legacy of Eugenics, Berkeley Public Health, June 20, 2024
https://publichealth.berkeley.edu/news-media/research-highlights/the-legacy-of-eugenics