Donald Trump Flirts With Race Science

One of Donald Trump’s signature rhetorical moves—and there are many—is wrapping his most heinous and controversial public statements in the faintest patina of ambiguity. Not enough to obscure his point. Not even enough to give actual plausible deniability. But enough for Trump and his followers to wave away their critics as hysterical.

In 2015, when Trump famously said that Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists, he also said, “Some, I assume, are good people.” In 2020, when Trump told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” his comments were not an outright condemnation of the far-right group, nor were they more than a winking nod in support.

Today, Trump debuted the latest version of this game. During an interview with the right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt, he danced around suggesting that migrants coming across the southern border are genetically inferior. ​​“When you look at the things that [Vice President Kamala Harris] proposes, they’re so far off, she has no clue,” Trump told Hewitt. “How about allowing people to come to an open border, 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. 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.”

This number isn’t quite right. There are 13,099 noncitizens that have been convicted of homicide and are not in ICE custody, according to the agency, though that doesn’t mean they are roaming the country freely. These data span at least 40 years and include noncitizens who came in during the Trump administration.

Regardless, it was perhaps inevitable that Trump would eventually dip his toes into the grimy puddle of race science—the pseudoscientific belief that race carries specific genetic tendencies that explain differences in intelligence and other behavioral proclivities. He has also long expressed a belief that genes determine your life. In 1988, he went on The Oprah Winfrey Show and professed that “you have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.” He has repeated versions of this sentiment since then. It was only a matter of time before he began linking his belief in genes with his belief in the inferiority of migrants.

That Trump would do so now makes sense. As I wrote in August, explicit race science has been surging out of the most decrepit corners of the fringe right and into its mainstream. Both Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk recently invited Steve Sailer, a prominent race-science proponent, on to their respective podcasts. A related belief in a “natural order” and eugenics has also taken hold among influential sets in the right, with the ascent of figures such as Bronze Age Pervert, the online pseudonym for Costin Alamariu. Elon Musk, who has become a right-wing influencer and spoke at a Trump rally on Saturday, has publicly engaged with posts from prominent pro-race-science accounts on X, his social-media platform.

If Trump is ever pressed on these race-science comments, he’ll try to sidestep his way out of them, just as he did with his comments about the Proud Boys, Mexican people, and the like. He might say that he was simply talking about murderers in general, or a specific subset of immigrants who happen to be murderers. He might say that he’s simply citing the numbers—a standard move for race-science adherents, especially in this ongoing moment of data fetishism. His supporters are already chiming in with explanations on his behalf. But we can all see the point he’s making.