Yesterday at the White House, Trump held a photo op with a 16-year-old lifeguard, Ryder Williams, who’d pulled a drowning 10-year-old out of a dangerous surf in Santa Cruz. For any other president, it would have been a sweet, feel-good moment. Trump, though, turned it into something dark — and most of our press either missed it or politely pretended to.
After giving the award, Trump looked at the blonde teen’s parents and said:
“You did a good job. It’s good genetics. When you look at him, you can see, really good.”
People in the room chuckled nervously as some probably realized what Trump was really saying. Others seemed clueless. Mediaite wrote the story up and wondered out loud if Trump was trying to invoke the infamous Sydney Sweeney “great jeans” commercial.
But Trump wasn’t riffing on the jeans ad. He was sharing, in the Oval office and on camera, something he’s been saying for 40 years, his racist “racehorse genetics” theory of human evolution. And it’s something that, when it comes out of other people’s mouths, has ended careers.
For example, back in 1988 on Martin Luther King Day, CBS’s sports commentator Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder was asked by a reporter about the progress that Black people were making in the field of sports.
Snyder told the reporter that Black athletes were doing well because “the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have a big black kid,” and that a Black athlete was better than most whites “because he’s been bred to be that way.”
CBS fired him the next day because everybody in America understood instantly what he had said and where it came from.
Thirty-eight years later, the President of the United States says essentially the same thing about human beings in the White House and gets laughs and a write-up about denim.
This was not a slip of the tongue. The same year Jimmy The Greek was fired, Trump told Oprah on her show that his success was the result of being “born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.” (Forget the fact that his father gave him ~$400 million.) He told a rally audience in 2016 that, with him, “winning is innate” and some people just “have the winning gene.”
Michael D’Antonio who wrote one of the early Trump biographies and knew the family, told PBS’s Frontline program that they all subscribed to the so-called “racehorse theory of human development.”
That theory says that because breeding top racehorses with each other produces more top racehorses then, similarly, a superior man and a superior woman will produce superior children. He even once complimented a roomful of British businessmen on their superior “bloodlines” and praised notorious antisemite Henry Ford’s “good bloodlines” while touring a Ford plant.
Talking to an all-white audience in Bemidji, Minnesota in 2020, Trump warned about the Black Somali refugees who’d settled in that state, saying:
“You [white people] have good genes, you know that, right? A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”
On rightwing talk host Hugh Hewitt’s hate radio show, he said:
“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’s “racehorse theory” isn’t just some throwaway line or colorful figure of speech; it’s from the foundational myth of one of the darkest times in American history, the eugenics (“racial hygiene”) movement that reached its peak during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, a notorious racist who screened the Klan recruiting film Birth of a Nation at the White House. Hitler based his “final solution” on American and British eugenics literature that encouraged the isolation and sterilization of “inferior” people.
That led to the racist 1924 Immigration Act that later turned away Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s death camps, and the Supreme Court blessed a model sterilization law for “inferior” humans in their 1927 Buck v Bell decision. German lawyers translated that decision and used it as the framework for the Third Reich’s own 1933 sterilization law that preceded and ultimately set up the Holocaust.
Tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized against their will back then, and at the Nuremberg trials multiple German defendants argued that they were “simply following American science.”
But the racehorse theory of humanity wasn’t even new in the 1920s: slavery was justified in this country for centuries based on the supposed inferiority of Black people. Crainiometry — the “science” of determining how “advanced” a person is by measuring their skull — was rolled out in the 19th century as a way of proving whites were the most advanced race.
In 1851, a Louisiana physician named Samuel Cartwright published a nationally distributed pamphlet claiming that enslaved people who’d run away from their plantations were doing so because they suffered from a mental illness he called “drapetomania.” He explicitly wrote that God had made Black people “naturally submissive,” so when they rose up or escaped, it was because they were expressing symptoms of that mental pathology.
Southern politicians trying to justify Jim Crow after the failure of Reconstruction used the same trick MAGA racists use today, citing crime and imprisonment statistics by way of “proving” that Black people are simply “born bad.” As noted Substack author Rohn Kenyatta writes:
“The manifestation of this racism and white supremacy need not be blatant as it is often cloaked in stories on crime, poverty, voting rights, illiteracy and ‘civil rights.’”
The whole point of Trump’s racehorse theory is to provide a pseudo-scientific explanation for the outcome of centuries of institutionalized racism. Today, while the median white family has assets of around $285,000 (home and car ownership, retirement funds, etc.), the median Black household is only worth $45,000.
Trump doesn’t want you to know why, and his good or bad genes proclamations are designed to make us ignore everything from unequal access to the GI Bill and Redlining to plain old racism.
Trump’s complained that the Smithsonian dwells too much on “how bad slavery was” and his executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” nailed eight Smithsonian museums under White House review for having displays about “how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been” without, presumably, discussing the failure of their genes.
As a result of his administration’s racist pressure, the National Park Service is rewriting its exhibits on slavery at Independence Hall, one of the more prominent places where George Washington held people in slavery. It wasn’t that Washington was a racist, Trump would presumably tell you, but that the people he enslaved deserved it because of their inferior genes.
And much of the GOP is right there with him. Congressman Steve King spent years babbling about how white people have contributed more than “any other subgroup of people” to western civilization, warning that “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”
Tommy Tuberville, when asked whether white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military, answered, “I call them Americans.” Steve Scalise became House Majority Leader after bragging that he’d spoken to a 2002 convention of Klan Grand Wizard David Duke’s European-American Unity and Rights Organization. A reporter said he’d called himself “David Duke without the baggage,” although Scalese disputes it.
When Politico exposed a group of Young Republican leaders having a group chat that was filled with jokes about gas chambers and Hitler admiration, JD Vance called the negative reaction “pearl clutching.” Tucker Carlson hosted open racist Nick Fuentes on his show for a friendly hour, and the president of the Heritage Foundation went so far as to defend them both.
Trump’s acting undersecretary for public policy, Darren Beattie, says America should “pay smart people to have more kids, disincentivize stupid people from having kids,” and Bob Kennedy is pushing changes in Title X to implicitly encourage white women to have more babies.
None of this is new even to the modern GOP. In his first campaign stop after winning the Republican nomination for president, Ronald Reagan spoke to an all-white audience near Philadelphia, Mississippi, a few miles from where Klansmen sheriff’s deputies had brutally murdered 3 civil rights workers (it was made into the movie “Mississippi Burning”). His topic? “State’s rights.” And we all know what that means, as did his audience.
And in July 2016, Donald Trump Jr. stood on that same stage stumping for his father, and proudly bragged that Reagan had launched his campaign from it.
Trump’s “racehorse theory” of humanity is a racist lie that was built to justify slavery and Jim Crow, and then paved the road to Auschwitz.
Democrats and the media need to start saying so out loud every time he invokes it.