Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Trump’s Racist Rhetoric on Steroids. Will Country Reject President’s White Supremacy Rule?
September 25, 2020
Donald Trump, Racist-in-Chief (Gage Skidmore
By Bill Berkowitz
This is where we are at: At a recent rally in Bemidji, Minnesota, Donald Trump opened by vilifying Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee that Trump has demonized since she entered Congress, and then proceeded to heap praise on Confederate General Robert E. Lee: "[Lincoln] was getting beaten a lot by Robert E Lee. They want to rip down his statue all over the place ... he would have won except for Gettysburg ... these were incredible things." Then he delivered the coup de grace. Trump told the overwhelmingly white crowd: “You 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.”
A few days ago, Gale Bataille and I wrote about a former nurse’s allegations that a doctor was performing hysterectomies on un-consenting inmates at a privatized ICE facility in Georgia. . Those medical procedures evoked the horrendous Nazi experiments performed in concentration camps during World War II – medical “experiments” rooted in the dark history of eugenics in America, which Germany’s Adolph Hitler embraced and emulated.
Back to the Bemidji, Minnesota rally: “The racehorse theory refers to the thoroughbred breeding concept popularized by early 20th century horse breeder John E. Madden who stated ‘Breed the best to the best and hope for the best,’” The Forward’s David Ian Klein pointed out.
In an interview on PBS Frontline’s “The Choice,” Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio, author of The Truth About Trump, published in 2015, said: “The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development. They believe that there are superior people, and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get superior offspring.”
The Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson reported: “It doesn’t take a secret decoder ring to understand what Trump was aiming at in Bemidji [Minnesota]. The idea that white Minnesotans, like racehorses, have superior, inheritable genes is white supremacy – embraced not as a cultural construct, but as if it were based in hard science. In another moment, Trump’s remarks would have made for a front-page scandal. But on Friday, as America reeled from the death of a feminist icon whose departure threatens to accelerate a generation-long right-wing takeover of America’s highest court, as well as from a death toll in the coronavirus pandemic that has surpassed 200,000, the president’s open embrace of eugenics hardly sparked notice.”
"For Minnesota Jews, it's chilling to hear this language, which echoes the 'race science' used by the Nazis to justify the extermination of so many of our ancestors," Carin Mrotz, the executive director of Jewish Community Action, a racial and economic justice nonprofit, told the StarTribune. "But we recognize that the President is choosing this language intentionally, celebrating the supposed genetic superiority of European immigrants here in Minnesota on stolen Native land that has become home to immigrants from all over the world, to sow division and hatred between us."
Minnesota, where George Floyd was executed by police less than five months ago, is a state that is 84% white, and where German and Scandinavian ancestry dominates.
Steve Silberman, author of the best selling book NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, and an award winning science writer, tweeted: “As a historian who has written about the Holocaust, I'll say bluntly: This is indistinguishable from the Nazi rhetoric that led to Jews, disabled people, LGBTQ, Romani and others being exterminated. This is America 2020. This is where the GOP has taken us.”
Of course this wasn’t the first time that Trump talked about having superior genes. "Well, I think I was born with a drive for success," he told CNN in 2010. "I'm a gene believer. Hey, when you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with a fast horse. And I really was -- you know, I had a -- a good gene pool from the standpoint of that."
"I have Ivy League education, smart guy, good genes. I have great genes and all that stuff, which I'm a believer in," Trump told a crowd in Mississippi in 2016.
In a 2017 interview with CNN, he said: “Well, I think I was born with the drive for success because I have a certain gene,” he said. “I’m a gene believer … Hey, when you connect two race horses, you usually end up with a fast horse.
This year, during a May 21 visit to a Ford Motor Company facility in Ypsilanti, Michigan, Trump parted from scripted remarks to point out that, the founder of the company, Henry Ford had “good bloodlines, good bloodlines -- if you believe in that stuff, you got good blood.”
In a BuzzFlash editorial dated May 23, 2020, Mark Karlin wrote: “Ford was such a rabid anti-Semite that he was the only American praised in Mein Kampf, and was lavishly praised as an inspiration in ‘exposing’ Jews as part of a pernicious conspiracy theory, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which claimed that Jewish bankers controlled the world. Ford believed that Jews and not Hitler were the cause of World War II, and Hitler awarded him the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, his most prestigious award for foreigners in 1938. According to The Intercept, as early as 1922 Hitler had German translations of Ford’s anti-Semitic diatribes displayed in his office, as well as a portrait of the man who revolutionized assembly line car production.”
What’s the big deal, say Trump’s Republican defenders, he’s only talking about genes. But Trump’s abstraction is rooted in the Republican political operative, the late Lee Atwater’s 1981 guidance: "You start out in 1954 by saying, 'N****r, n****r, n****r.' By 1968 you can't say 'n****r' -- that hurts you, backfires. "So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now (that) you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is (that) Blacks get hurt worse than Whites."
So, here we are in 2020 a century after the birth of eugenics in this nation, with an American president openly spouting racist tropes as a reelection strategy. For Trump, its more palatable to talk about “good genes” and the racehorse theory of supremacy than the pseudo-science and ideology that gave cover to so many atrocities of the 20th century, but therein lies NO difference.
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