With the presidential race in its closing weeks, Donald J. Trump’s language has grown increasingly strident on the issue of immigration. But as he continues to demonize undocumented migrants as violent criminals, the former president is also reviving another old habit: invoking his long-held fascination with genes and genetics.
For decades, including long before he became a political figure, Mr. Trump has been publicly obsessed with bloodlines and his stated belief that genetics are the best predictor of a person’s success. He has repeatedly commented on what he described as his, his family’s and his supporters’ good genes, and on others’ bad genes.
In an interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show” on Monday, Mr. Trump misleadingly cited government data to assert that thousands of murderers had crossed the southern border under the Biden administration. And then he pivoted.
“Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Hewitt, a conservative radio talk show host. “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.”
Mr. Trump’s remarks about migrants’ having “bad genes” brought a flurry of headlines from news outlets, and then condemnation from Democrats. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, called the language “vile, disturbing, hateful” during a briefing on Monday.
Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, accused the news media of ginning up a controversy, saying that Mr. Trump “was clearly referring to murderers, not migrants.”
Mr. Trump has spoken openly about his belief in the racehorse theory, an idea, adapted from horse breeding, that good bloodlines produce superior offspring. He offered a quick explanation for how the theory applies to humans at a rally in Nevada this year. He was proclaiming his own intelligence by noting that his uncle, John Trump, was a longtime professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Same genes, we have the genes,” Mr. Trump said of his uncle, who died in 1985. “We’re smart people.” Then he added: “We’re like racehorses, too. You know, the fast ones produce the fast ones, and the slow ones doesn’t work out so well, right? But we’re no, we’re no different in that sense.”
It was not the first time that Mr. Trump has pointed to the theory to bolster his claims of superiority. But he has also extended the notion to others, often praising the genes of supporters he is shouting out from the stage. During his 2020 campaign, he notably praised the makeup of a substantially white crowd at a rally in Minnesota.
“You have good genes,” he said. “You know that, right? 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.”
Mr. Trump, in contrast, has a pattern of using dehumanizing language to describe undocumented immigrants. He has repeatedly referred to immigrants who commit crimes as “animals.” At a rally in Ohio in March, he was even more explicit. “I don’t know if you call them people,” he said of immigrants accused of crimes. “In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion.”
His remarks on Monday in some ways echoed his repeated assertion last year that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” a phrase criticized by many for evoking the ideology of eugenics promulgated by Nazis in Germany and white supremacists in the United States.
Mr. Trump has defended his use of that phrase by saying he was “not a student of Hitler,” even as a number of news articles, biographers and books about his presidency have documented his long interest in Hitler. He has largely stopped using the poisoning-the-blood phrase.
More than a century ago, the eugenics movement played a role in both conservative and liberal politics in America.
Eugenics, the discredited belief that the human race can be improved through selective breeding, was often aimed at people of color, or those who were poor or had disabilities. Many states had eugenics programs that conducted state-ordered sterilizations, in an attempt to, as they saw it, stop poverty and improve the gene pool. Theodore Roosevelt supported eugenics theories during his presidency, raising fears several times in the early 1900s of “race suicide” because well-off white women were not having enough children.
As Mr. Trump tries to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris in November by making immigration central to his campaign, his language has grown harsher than in past years. He frequently makes baseless claims that other countries deliberately send prisoners and mentally ill people to the United States, while ignoring the substantial share of families with children crossing the southern border.
Polls have consistently shown that voters believe Mr. Trump is better on immigration than Ms. Harris. During a visit to the border last month meant to help her address her vulnerability on the issue, Ms. Harris staked out a tougher stance than any Democrat in decades, promising to continue President Biden’s crackdown on asylum and to enforce order better at the border.
Though illegal crossings at the border surged during the Biden administration, they have decreased since Mr. Biden imposed an executive order in June to ban asylum for those who cross illegally. Some recent polls have shown Ms. Harris narrowing Mr. Trump’s advantage on the issue compared with the edge he had over Mr. Biden before the president suspended his campaign.
Mr. Trump’s comments on Monday were focused on a group of about 13,000 murderers that he claims have crossed the border during the Biden administration.
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement released data last month showing that there were 13,099 immigrants convicted of homicide who were being tracked by immigration officials but had not been detained by them.
After the data was released, Homeland Security officials said the figure included people who entered the United States over several decades as well as people who might already be in the custody of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.
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