Donald Trump has hit out at accusations of scientific racism after suggesting some people will commit murder because it’s ‘in their genes’

Donald Trump is once more courting controversy by suggesting that illegal immigrants are at risk of committing heinous crimes resulting from genetic aspects.

The former president and current candidate of the Republican Party within the 2024 presidential election appeared on the web site “The Hugh Hewitt Show” to debate the primary anniversary of the Hamas-led attack on Israel, which marked the start of a brutal and ongoing genocide that has killed over 41,000 Palestinians.

Trump spoke on other foreign relations topics, while also hurling quite a few insults at President Joe Biden and Trump’s current opponent, Kamala Harris. On the problem of immigration, he addressed the vice chairman, stating that she desired to “feed people in a government way” and “enter the system like the communist party.”

However, it was his later comments about illegal immigrants that sparked accusations that the previous president was once more toying with scientific racism.

“How about allowing people to cross an open border, 13,000 of whom are murderers? Many of them have murdered far more than one person and now live happily in the United States,” Trump he said. “You know, I’m a murderer now, I believe it, it’s in my genes. And we have a lot of bad genes in our country now. They left, 425,000 people came to our country who should not be here and who are criminals. Do you know one of the worst statistics? 325,000 little children missing.”

“Let me guess…immigrants coming from Europe don’t have ‘bad genes,'” wrote one X user. “The KKK thought the same about black people during Jim Crow and after,” another person added.

According to National Human Genome InstituteScientific racism is a historical pattern of ideologies that misuse science to advertise false scientific beliefs through which dominant racial and ethnic groups are perceived as superior.

Leading scientists in lots of industrialized countries within the nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries espoused these ideologies, but by the mid-Twentieth century the pseudoscientific racist beliefs were widely debunked. Despite this, evidence shows that scientific racism persists in science and research.

This discredited set of beliefs was strongly held against Black Americans throughout the Jim Crow era, when the eugenics movement became widely popular. Scientists would encourage white Americans to marry and reproduce only amongst their own race, labeling ethnic minority genes as “unfit” for improvement in future generations. Former President Teddy Roosevelt was one of the predominant supporters of eugenics within the early Twentieth century.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for his campaign, said Trump’s latest comments about immigrants he told NBC News“He was clearly talking about MURDERERS, not migrants.”

As for the 13,000 figure that Trump used to make his point, he’s referring to the 13,000 immigrants convicted of murder who will not be in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. However, three ICE officials he said NBC’s data doesn’t include whether these people are in state or local prisons. Other officials said the information dates back many years and that many of these people arrived within the United States before Biden’s presidential term, including while Trump was in office.

Trump’s harsh rhetoric on immigration dates back to when he first ran for president. He once said that Mexico “doesn’t send its best” and suggested that many migrants crossing the border are “rapists” and “criminals.” He fiercely advocated radical border policies that included constructing a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

At a rally in Minnesota in 2020, he again invoked the science of race and told a predominantly white crowd: “You have good genes. You know that, right? You have good genes. Rather a lot of it has to do with genes, don’t you think that? The racehorse theory. Do you think that we’re that different? You’ve got good Minnesota genes.

Racehorse theory was and still is widely adopted by white supremacists to perpetuate the thought of ​​racial purity and eugenics that whiteness is the top of genetics.