Donald Trump’s Decades-Long Obsession With Eugenics
By Julia Métraux,
Mother Jones
| 05. 28. 2025
"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...
Related Articles
By Lucy Tu, The Atlantic | 07.11.2025
Donald Trump—who is, by his own accounting, “the fertilization president” and “the father of IVF”—wants to help Americans reproduce. During his 2024 campaign, he promised that the government or insurance companies would cover the cost of in vitro fertilization. In...
By Jared Whitlock, Endpoints News | 07.15.2025
Patient groups face a harder and unpredictable path going state-by-state to boost screening for rare but treatable conditions after the Trump administration disbanded a federal advisory committee on newborn screening.
In April, the Advisory Committee on Heritable Disorders in Newborns...
By Ben Fidler and Ned Pagliarulo, Biopharma Dive | 07.21.2025
One month ago, a 51-year-old man treated in a clinical trial with an experimental gene therapy became dangerously sick. The developer of that treatment, Sarepta Therapeutics, informed the Food and Drug Administration his case could be life-threatening.
The man died...
By Pat Duggins, Alabama Public Radio | 06.27.2025
PAT DUGGINS-- If I were to say, ‘man, have you seen the price of eggs these days?’ You're probably thinking, Oh, he's talking about inflation and the price of groceries and how it became an issue in the presidential race...