Many people were shocked to read allegations last year by Donald Trump’s nephew, Fred Trump III, about his uncle: Fred, whose son William has intellectual and developmental disabilities, reported that the elder Trump said during his first presidential term that people like William should “just die.”
That is shocking—but it’s not surprising. The comment falls into a pattern of eugenicist and ableist views that Trump has espoused all the way back to the 1980s, when he spoke openly about the importance of having “the right genes” in an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
The opposition’s failure to address and confront Trump’s eugenicist views, the American studies scholar Susan Currell wrote in a 2019 article, “shows that a wide-ranging eugenic ideology is embedded in the broader American body politic.” The lack of emphasis on Trump’s comments and record around disability and genetics bears that out. Trump makes a lot of outrageous statements—but there’s a pattern to his comments about intelligence (or lack thereof), his intense hostility towards disabled people (including reputed public use of the r-word stretching back decades), and his preoccupation with “good” genes: it’s inseparable from his constant promotion of Afrikaner and Northern European immigration, sympathy to claims of “white genocide,” and promotion of close advisors like Stephen Miller and Elon Musk.
Taken together, that track record illustrates the sitting president’s eugenicist mindset—one that comes into sharp focus in the timeline below.
