Donald Trump is flirting with racial science

One of Donald Trump's signature rhetorical moves – and there are many – is to cloak his most vile and controversial public statements in the slightest patina of ambiguity. Not enough to obscure his point. Not even enough to allow for actual plausible deniability. But enough for Trump and his supporters to dismiss their critics as hysterical.

When Trump famously said in 2015 that Mexican immigrants were criminals and rapists, he also said, “Some of them, I suspect, are good people.” When Trump told the Proud Boys in 2020 to “stand back and stand by,” they were His comments were neither a clear condemnation of the right-wing extremist group nor more than a tongue-in-cheek nod of support.

Today Trump introduced the latest version of this game. During an interview with right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt, he danced around suggesting that migrants coming across the southern border were genetically inferior. ​​”If you look at the things that (Vice President Kamala Harris) is proposing, they are so far out there that she has no idea,” Trump told Hewitt. “How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of whom were murderers? Many of them have murdered far more than one person and are now living happily in the United States. You know, being a murderer now – I think that – is in their genes. And we have a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

This number is not entirely correct. According to the agency, there are 13,099 non-citizens convicted of murder who are not in ICE custody. However, this does not mean that they move freely around the country. This data spans at least 40 years and includes non-citizens who entered the country during the Trump administration.

Regardless, it was perhaps inevitable that Trump would eventually dip his toes into the dirty puddle of racial science — the pseudoscientific belief that race entails certain genetic tendencies that explain differences in intelligence and other behavioral tendencies. He has also long held the belief that genes determine life. In 1988 he continued The Oprah Winfrey Show and explained, “You have to be born lucky, in the sense that you have to have the right genes.” He has since repeated versions of this sentiment. It was only a matter of time before he began to combine his belief in genes with his belief in the inferiority of migrants.

It makes sense that Trump would do this now. As I wrote in August, explicit race science has moved from the most seedy corners of the far right into the mainstream. Both Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk recently invited Steve Sailer, a prominent racial science advocate, to their respective podcasts. A related belief in a “natural order” and eugenics have also taken hold among influential circles on the right, with the rise 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 addressed posts from prominent pro-race science accounts on X, his social media platform.

If Trump is ever pressured about these racial science comments, he will try to avoid them, just as he did with his comments about the Proud Boys, the Mexican people, and the like. He could say he was simply talking about murderers in general or a specific subset of immigrants who happen to be murderers. He might say he's simply quoting the numbers — a standard move for adherents of racial science, especially in this ongoing moment of data fetishism. His supporters are already lining up with statements on his behalf. But we can all understand what he means.