[Source]
President Donald Trump told “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade, who is white, during a phone interview about immigration on Friday that immigrants don’t have “your genes.” He combined that statement with the assertion that immigrants entering the United States are criminals and should be banned. By linking criminal behavior to biology, Trump’s rhetoric suggested fundamental racial differences between immigrants and white Americans.
Trump’s eugenics language
Trump made the comments in response to a question about violence involving Muslim individuals, arguing that some “should not be allowed in” while others have “gone bad.” “They’re sick people, and a lot of them were put in here. They shouldn’t have been put in here,” he said, before adding, “The others were just bad. They went bad. Something went wrong — something went wrong there.”
He then attributed the behavior to biology, saying, “Brian, genes are not exactly your genes, it’s one of the problems. It’s a terrible thing, and it happens, it happens too often,” linking the criminal behavior to a genetic trait rather than individual behavior or environment.
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This language reflects a core idea associated with eugenics, the long-debunked belief that social outcomes such as crime or behavior are determined by genetics and vary from group to group. This framework historically influenced exclusionary immigration policies and was a defining feature of Nazi racial ideology under Adolf Hitler, in which genetic differences were used to justify hierarchy and exclusion.
Not hiding white supremacy
Trump’s comments drew criticism from policy analysts and journalists, many of whom focused on his use of genetics to describe immigration and its historical impact.
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David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, wrote that the language reflected past thinking on U.S. immigration restrictions, saying, “Trump is an old-school eugenicist nativist. In fact, he is good to immigrants as long as they have the right ‘genes.'”
Journalist Alex Cole pointed out what he called an inconsistency in Trump’s framing, writing on
Journalist Mehdi Hassan offered a more direct description: “He’s a white supremacist. He doesn’t hide it.”
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The rhetorical history of invoking “blood” and genetics
Trump’s reference to “genetics” builds on years of rhetoric in which he described immigrants as a threat defined by identity and, more recently, genes.
In 2015, Trump launched his first presidential campaign by criminalizing immigration, describing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” bringing “drugs” and “crime” into the United States. This framework establishes a baseline argument centered on behavior and threats. As president in 2020, he repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus,” a label that researchers and scholars later linked to a rise in documented anti-Asian hate incidents.
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By 2023, his rhetoric was turning more explicitly to genetics. Trump has said at multiple campaign events that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” citing language that historians and analysts have noted are similar to earlier exclusionary ideologies. This phrasing is very similar to passages from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which originally warned of the nation’s decline due to “blood poisoning.”
While some of Trump’s supporters believe comparisons to the Nazi leader are exaggerated, the overlap goes beyond rhetoric, as his use of biological language is coupled with policies that include restrictions and bans on immigration from majority-Muslim countries, sweeping restrictions on asylum at the southern border, massive deportations, aggressive ICE enforcement, immigration detention facilities that have been criticized for their conditions, and efforts to strip citizenship from some naturalized Americans.
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This story is part of The Rebel Yellow Newsletter, a bold weekly newsletter from the creators of NextShark that retells our stories and celebrates Asian American voices.
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