Donald Trump’s Decades-Long Obsession With Eugenics

^{"Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at the South Point Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada" by Gage Skidmore licensed under CC by SA 2.0} 

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...