Former president Donald Trump has long espoused a worldview in which genes are the determinative factor in someone\u2019s life. In 1988, for example, he told Oprah Winfrey that success requires luck \u2014 and that \u201cyou have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a 1990 interview, he said that he would not have followed in his father\u2019s footsteps had he been born into a coal-mining family rather than a rent-mining one.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe coal miner gets black-lung disease, his son gets it, then his son,\u201d he said. \u201cIf I had been the son of a coal miner, I would have left the damn mines.\u201d This, he said, was because he, unlike those poor coal miners, had the \u201cability to become an entrepreneur, a great athlete, a great writer. You\u2019re either born with it or you\u2019re not.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s in the genes.<\/p>\n
Trump has previously raised this theory of genetics on the campaign trail. In 2020, for example, he praised the \u201cgood genes\u201d 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 \u201cflood your state with an influx of refugees from Somalia.\u201d The transition did not escape the notice of observers.<\/p>\n
In an interview with right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday morning, Trump\u2019s suggestion that non-White immigrants are genetically inferior was made explicit.<\/p>\n
The comment came as Trump was disparaging his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow about allowing people to come through an open border,\u201d he said, \u201c13,000 of which were murderers, many of them murdered far more than one person and they\u2019re now happily living in the United States?\u201d<\/p>\n
This is a false claim \u2014 \u201coutrageously false,\u201d in the wording of The Washington Post Fact Checker \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
Unchallenged by Hewitt, Trump continued on the subject.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it\u2019s in their genes,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.\u201d Reinforcing that he was talking about the \u201cbad genes\u201d of immigrants, Trump offered up more false claims based on the ICE data.<\/p>\n
Hewitt, rather than contesting Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s estimation, but instead of the political whims of Biden. (In reality, they are a function of Trump\u2019s actions.)<\/p>\n
Trump has a track record of dehumanizing immigrants, repeatedly referring to immigrants who commit crimes as \u201canimals,\u201d for example. He also has a record of disparaging immigrants in sweeping terms, aggregating them by nationality as a rationale for declaring them unwanted.<\/p>\n
He does this with other nonimmigrant groups as well. Speaking to Hewitt, for example, Trump appeared to conflate \u201cJewish Americans\u201d with \u201cIsrael\u201d \u2014 as he has in the past.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think Israel has to do one thing: They have to get smart about Trump,\u201d he said in the interview. \u201cBecause they don\u2019t back me. I did more for Israel than anybody. I did more for the Jewish people than anybody. And it\u2019s not a reciprocal, as they say. Not reciprocal.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here Hewitt did push back: His numbers, in Hewitt\u2019s estimation, were improving among Jewish voters. But Trump replied that they \u201cshould be 100 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n
This inability to see nuance in cultural and national groups of which he isn\u2019t a member is one thing. His claim that America was being flooded with \u201cbad genes\u201d thanks to new arrivals to the country is another thing entirely. It\u2019s also one that might evoke unsettling historic parallels for some Jewish observers.<\/p>\n
Beyond the racism of such claims, it\u2019s also striking how self-serving Trump\u2019s deployment of genetics is. Immigrants to the United States \u2014 like the Haitian immigrants now living legally in Ohio who were the target of lies by Trump and his running mate last month \u2014 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\u2019s 1990 calculus, the winners of the same genetic lottery as him. Except that, unlike him, they haven\u2019t been convicted of crimes.<\/p>\n
But such inconsistencies aren\u2019t important to Trump because the \u201cgenetics\u201d thing isn\u2019t based on evidence or science. It\u2019s just a way for him (and by extension, some of his supporters) to view themselves as superior to the immigrants he\u2019s scapegoating. This has always been the subtext to Trump\u2019s politics. He\u2019s just making it more explicit.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Former president Donald Trump has long espoused a worldview in which genes are the determinative factor in someone\u2019s life. In 1988, for example, he told Oprah Winfrey that success requires luck \u2014 and that \u201cyou have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.\u201d In a 1990 interview, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10708,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10707\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}