Murderous Genes and Criminal Brains

ON OCTOBER 7, 2024, in an interview with conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, then–presidential candidate Donald Trump said of immigrants that “many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Although Trump’s campaign would later pretend that this comment was “clearly” directed at “murderers” and not immigrants, and more specifically at those “illegal” persons “invading” the country at the southern border, similar statements from his 2024 campaign, not to mention his pre-government days, make clear that they are a Trumpian refrain rather than an aberration. This refrain, which derives from our country’s long history of eugenic “science,” clearly continues to operate actively and prescriptively in the present.

A kind of living relic of that science, the phrase is often deployed to imply instinctive criminality. When wrapped in nativist fantasies of racial purity, “bad genes” mobilizes the nation’s long-standing fear of the nonwhite Other, typically portrayed as...