Opinion: When Trump talks 'bad genes' and 'racehorse theory,' he is telling us who he is

Oct. 10, 2024 3 AM PT

Donald Trump’s fascination with genetics, especially his own “good genes” of the white European sort, as well as the “bad genes” of the you-know-which types, has always been creepy. I won’t compare him to Hitler; I leave that to historians and JD Vance.

Here’s Vance in 2016, before Trump’s election: Writing to a former Yale Law classmate, Vance mused, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a--hole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad … or that he’s America’s Hitler.”

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Jackie Calmes

Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.

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Trump’s obsession with genes is disturbing enough for signaling his belief in the long-discredited, racist theory of eugenics, the idea (embraced most famously by the Nazis) that selective breeding — eliminating undesirables — can improve a nation’s population. The former president is unabashed in spreading his belief in “racehorse theory,” the human version.

Often he merely brags in passing about his own superior breeding. “I mean it’s a good gene pool right there,” he once said, pointing at his head, to NBC’s Lester Holt. He often drops such boasts into his rambling rally monologues. But occasionally, Trump says something so outrageous about other people, the ones with supposedly bad genes and — wouldn’t you know it? — darker skin, that the Hitler talk starts all over again. Trump just doesn’t care, even as he aspires to lead a melting pot nation.

So it was again this week. On Monday, he called into the radio show of friendly conservative Hugh Hewitt. At one point, Trump repeated a favorite lie of late. He claimed that Kamala Harris, as vice president, has allowed more than 13,000 murderers into the country to roam free, when in fact that number reflects migrants, most of them in prisons, whom the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been keeping track of over four decades — including during Trump’s term — for possible deportation once they serve their sentences.

But Trump was on a roll. He told Hewitt, “You know now, a murderer — I believe this — it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

Among those aghast at this pseudo-science was Beth Shapiro, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz: “This is eugenics,” she tweeted. “As President of the American Genetics Association and a human, I reject this. We are better than this.”

We might be, but Trump’s not.

Last year, in an interview with a far-right website, he said that immigration is “poisoning the blood of our country.” He repeated that contention in December, campaigning in New Hampshire for the Republican nomination. He told the crowd that the poison was coming from South America, Africa and Asia — everywhere but Europe, it seemed.

Robert Jones, founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, told NPR, “Trump has clearly crossed into the domain of Nazi ideology openly.” (Hitler, in “Mein Kampf,” decried the threat of Jewish blood in Germany: “All the great civilizations of the past became decadent because the originally creative race died out, as a result of contamination of the blood.”)

Under fire, Trump dismissed the criticism then by saying he was “not a student of Hitler.” Maybe not a student exactly, but… First wife Ivana Trump said Trump kept an anthology of Hitler’s speeches at his bedside. And Trump’s White House chief of staff and former Marine Gen. John F. Kelly said he urged Trump to stop praising Hitler, only to have the then-president insist, “Hitler did a lot of good things.”

The record on Trump’s eugenics fixation goes back at least four decades. In 1988 he told Oprah Winfrey, by way of explaining his success, “You have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.” (It didn’t hurt that, besides genes, his father, Fred Trump, also gave him $400 million.) Visiting Britain as president, he effused at a black-tie dinner with mostly white business leaders and government ministers, “You’ve all got such good bloodlines in this room.” Touring a Ford plant in Michigan in 2020, he praised the “good bloodlines” of company founder Henry Ford, a proud antisemite.

And at a reelection campaign stop that year in Minnesota, where waves of Northern European immigrants settled in the 19th century, Trump interjected to the nearly all-white crowd, “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.”

As if his meaning weren’t clear enough, Trump segued to warn that 2020 rival Joe Biden, if elected, would “flood your state” with Somali refugees. Factcheck: Biden did not.

Jack O’Donnell, who was president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, told the New York Times in 2019, “He genuinely believes things like white people are smarter,” and that “laziness is a trait in blacks.”

Harris promises to be “a president for all Americans.” Trump, to an extent unseen in any president or aspirant in memory (even Nixon, JD!), divides Americans between us and them, between red states and blue (even when it comes to doling out disaster relief). It’s about who supports him, but it’s also about race and ethnicity.

If I subscribed to Trump’s beliefs, I guess I’d say it’s in his genes.

@jackiekcalmes

Column: When Trump talks ‘bad genes’ and ‘racehorse theory,’ he is telling us who he is

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