'Just die': Inside Trump's fixation on 'good genes' and 'great bloodlines'

Long before he was elected president of the United States, Donald Trump has been particularly vocal about his preference for "good genes" and his disdain for "bad genes."

On Wednesday, Mother Jones chronicled Trump's decades-long flirtation with "eugenics," or the theory that encouraging selective breeding among the human population can produce desirable traits. The outlet noted that Trump's first public utterance in regard to genetics was in a 1988 interview with Oprah Winfrey while promoting his "Art of the Deal" book, in which he said being "born with the right genes" was "lucky."

11 years later, Trump's great-nephew William was born with cerebral palsy. His father, Fred Trump III, said that Donald Trump refused to ever see William, and has never met him to this day. And in 2020, after hosting a disability summit at the White House, President Trump apparently told Fred that people with complex disabilities "should just die." That same year, Trump complimented Henry Ford's "great bloodlines" at a campaign event in Detroit.

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Trump once called himself a believer in "racehorse theory" during a 2020 rally in Minnesota, telling the crowd that they had "good genes." Likewise, Trump has said that undocumented immigrants were "poisoning the blood of our country" in 2023 when he was launching his 2024 bid for the White House. And he's also slammed immigrants for having "bad genes."

Mother Jones also recalled when Trump mocked disabled New York Times reporter Serge F. Kovaleski at a 2015 rally during his first campaign for the presidency, gesturing wildly while changing his voice. He later denied doing so, despite the incident being captured on video.

""I have no idea who Serge Kovaleski is, what he looks like or his level of intelligence," Trump said in a statement at the time. "I merely mimicked what I thought would be a flustered reporter trying to get out of a statement he made long ago."

Click here to read Mother Jones' report in full.

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