Former president Donald Trump has long espoused a worldview in which genes are the determinative factor in someone’s life. In 1988, for example, he told Oprah Winfrey that success requires luck — and that “you have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.”
In a 1990 interview, he said that he would not have followed in his father’s footsteps had he been born into a coal-mining family rather than a rent-mining one.
“The coal miner gets black-lung disease, his son gets it, then his son,” he said. “If I had been the son of a coal miner, I would have left the damn mines.” This, he said, was because he, unlike those poor coal miners, had the “ability to become an entrepreneur, a great athlete, a great writer. You’re either born with it or you’re not.”
It’s in the genes.
Trump has previously raised this theory of genetics on the campaign trail. In 2020, for example, he praised the “good genes” of people in Minnesota. He then offered a warning to those robust-gened Minnesotans: his opponent in his bid for reelection, Joe Biden, planned to “flood your state with an influx of refugees from Somalia.” The transition did not escape the notice of observers.
In an interview with right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday morning, Trump’s suggestion that non-White immigrants are genetically inferior was made explicit.
The comment came as Trump was disparaging his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“How about allowing people to come through an open border,” he said, “13,000 of which were murderers, many of them murdered far more than one person and they’re now happily living in the United States?”
This is a false claim — “outrageously false,” in the wording of The Washington Post Fact Checker — based on a misrepresentation of numbers released by the government. That data indicated that there were about 13,000 immigrants who had committed murder but were not in custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Many, though, are in custody elsewhere, including at the state level. Nor were they all immigrants who arrived during the Biden administration; many were here under Trump, too.
Unchallenged by Hewitt, Trump continued on the subject.
“You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes,” he said. “And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Reinforcing that he was talking about the “bad genes” of immigrants, Trump offered up more false claims based on the ICE data.
Hewitt, rather than contesting Trump’s genetic argument, shifted the conversation with no apparent irony to the federal criminal charges Trump himself faces. These, of course, are not a function of criminal genes, in Trump’s estimation, but instead of the political whims of Biden. (In reality, they are a function of Trump’s actions.)
Trump has a track record of dehumanizing immigrants, repeatedly referring to immigrants who commit crimes as “animals,” for example. He also has a record of disparaging immigrants in sweeping terms, aggregating them by nationality as a rationale for declaring them unwanted.
He does this with other nonimmigrant groups as well. Speaking to Hewitt, for example, Trump appeared to conflate “Jewish Americans” with “Israel” — as he has in the past.
“I think Israel has to do one thing: They have to get smart about Trump,” he said in the interview. “Because they don’t back me. I did more for Israel than anybody. I did more for the Jewish people than anybody. And it’s not a reciprocal, as they say. Not reciprocal.”
Here Hewitt did push back: His numbers, in Hewitt’s estimation, were improving among Jewish voters. But Trump replied that they “should be 100 percent.”
This inability to see nuance in cultural and national groups of which he isn’t a member is one thing. His claim that America was being flooded with “bad genes” thanks to new arrivals to the country is another thing entirely. It’s also one that might evoke unsettling historic parallels for some Jewish observers.
Beyond the racism of such claims, it’s also striking how self-serving Trump’s deployment of genetics is. Immigrants to the United States — like the Haitian immigrants now living legally in Ohio who were the target of lies by Trump and his running mate last month — are the ones who escaped the cycle of suffering that Trump referenced with his coal miner example. They are the ones who, in the face of natural disaster and political unrest, pulled up stakes and sought a new, better life. They are, according to Trump’s 1990 calculus, the winners of the same genetic lottery as him. Except that, unlike him, they haven’t been convicted of crimes.
But such inconsistencies aren’t important to Trump because the “genetics” thing isn’t based on evidence or science. It’s just a way for him (and by extension, some of his supporters) to view themselves as superior to the immigrants he’s scapegoating. This has always been the subtext to Trump’s politics. He’s just making it more explicit.