Ganesh Kendale
WASHINGTON: MAGA supremo Donald Trump doubled down on his racist dog whistles and bounded into the territory of eugenics on Monday, complaining there are “a lot of bad genes” in the US now because his opponent Kamala Harris is “allowing” illegal immigrant murderers into the country.
In an interview with conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, Trump made the case that 13000 illegal immigrants in the US with alleged homicide cases against them are predisposed to committing more murders because of their genes.”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,” Trump said.
Coming after other racially loaded remarks about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating dogs and cats, besides calling them “vermin” and “animals,” the comments sparked outrage among all but the MAGA crowd, with commentators hearing echoes of Nazi Germany in it. New Yorker writer Emily Nussbaum called Trump “a lifelong Nazi-style eugenicist,” who has brought up the subject of genes and bloodline for decades, even as the White House termed his remarks “hateful” and “disgusting.”
One angry TV host on the liberal MSNBC reminded Trump that his mother was an immigrant, as were two of his three wives. Trump reaches the “eugenics” stage of his descent towards ethnic cleansing, remarked another talking head. In a reminder that words have consequences, Republican never-Trumper Ana Navarro said it was such remarks that had led a gunman to go looking for Latinos in a Wal-Mart in El Paso in 2019, shooting dead 22 people.
Trump has frequently called minority critics and scribes, particularly women, “dumb” “stupid” and “low IQ,” while bragging about his own “genius” he attributes to family genes, often invoking an uncle from MIT. He has been particularly savage on Kamala Harris, not only questioning her intelligence, but also wondering how she got the last name Harris — a racially loaded suggestion that a woman with a “foreign” first name should not have an anglophone last name. Some commentators have said Trump’s antagonistic attitude toward Kamala Harris far exceeds misogyny, particularly after he supported an ugly MAGA slur that she advanced in politics due to sexual favors.
“Donald Trump is a convicted felon, misogynist, and sexual predator who continues to use sexual violence as a weapon to silence women. What’s more, his entire campaign is based on spreading misogyny and a permission structure for violence against women,” the National Organization for Women (NOW) said recently after Trump denigrated Harris, whose academic achievements critics praise in comparison to Trump’s own dubious credentials, with one analysis saying he speaks at 4th grade level, the lowest level of the last 15 US Presidents.
