THE SET-UP: When Trump hosted Roger Penske and his NASCAR team at the White House, he asked Joey Logano about the top speed he’d reached in his recent win. Logano said between 190-200 mph and Trump quickly responded:
“It takes a special … genetic, you know that, right? It’s genes … it’s genes, really. Most people couldn’t do that.”
And there it was again. Trump’s “race horse theory” of genetics … or, if we are being honest about it, his Trumped-up brand of eugenics.
No, he hasn’t instituted anything quite like sterilization schemes that robbed countless American children of their reproductive rights throughout the 20th Century. Nor has he come close to implementing anything at all like Nazi Germany’s brutal, systematic program of “racial hygiene.” But we also cannot ignore his long, oft-stated affinity for the same essential genetic theories that fueled eugenics policies in Germany and the United States. Trump publicly linked his success to his good genes as far back as a 1988 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. The examples in-between then and now are voluminous. Just plug “trump genes” into the Google machine if you’re curious. The results are revealing because his long-standing pattern explains many of his primary obsessions—like immigration from non-European countries and people supposedly being sent from “mental institutions” and so-called “DEI Hires.” They also shed light on his policy decisions—like purging Black generals or Black history being scrubbed at the Smithsonian or White South Africans being encouraged to migrate to the US as Brown folks are being illegally shipped to a cruel and unusual prison in El Salvador. His eugenics, however “soft,” is translating into policy and into consequences.
Perhaps the most alarming aspect of his obsession is the fact that it was never disqualifying. It was never even an issue. And that’s particularly alarming when you consider what that says about us. - jp
TITLE: Trumpian “Common Sense” and the History of IQ Tests
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/trumpian-common-sense-and-the-history-of-iq-tests/
EXCERPT: AT A PRESS CONFERENCE on January 30, 2025, the morning after a tragic midair collision in Washington, DC, between a military helicopter and an American Airlines plane, President Donald Trump rationalized the crash by invoking the Federal Aviation Administration’s attempts to diversify its workforce. “The FAA is actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website.” Citing no evidence that diversity programs had anything to do with the accident, which killed 67 people, his point—presumably—was to show that disability and competence do not mix. Those unable to discern the categorical difference between the two lacked what he labeled as “common sense.”
Trump was tacitly invoking the logic of eugenics by foregrounding what he saw as a clear-cut divide between “the highest level of genius” and “severe intellectual disability,” which mapped for him onto the divide between valuable workers and disposable and dangerous ones. His insults exploit the clarity—a false clarity, I argue—of the type of human intellectual categorization implicated in IQ tests. In Trump’s world, a high IQ score serves as shorthand for wealth, success, and power; “high IQ” and “low IQ” are his preferred ways of describing his respective allies and enemies. Starting in the first half of the 20th century, IQ tests fueled a high-stakes system of classification that informed who was deemed to deserve educational and professional opportunities. It is a history worth exploring because of how it persists in the “common sense” of our time, our current president, and his administration.
Nowhere has the logic of IQ tests had more influence than in the field of educational psychology and in the American school system. Access to educational opportunity has been a boon in many respects, but it has also naturalized socioeconomic inequality, in part because decisions about access exploit the comparative logic at the heart of IQ tests. In its earliest forms in the years around 1905, the French psychologist Alfred Binet used a series of tests to define what a child should be able to do at a particular age. The first test consisted of a series of 30 short tasks—related to expectations for comprehension, reasoning, and memory—that were sequenced according to their difficulty. A child proceeded through the exam until she could no longer complete the tasks. The age associated with the last task she could perform was her assigned mental age. To be sure, IQ scores are now calculated in a more complex way, but their meaning still emerges through a logic of comparison. Plotted on a bell curve, “the intellectually disabled” and “the gifted” are, through the logic of a graph, shown to be objectively different from the great swathe of “normal” people in between.
But over time, what constitutes a “gifted” as opposed to a “normal” or “intellectually disabled” student has fluctuated, revealing the historical and social contingency of such categories. For example, in 1959, former president of Harvard University James Bryant Conant proposed moving the cutoff for labeling a student as gifted to an IQ score of 130, 10 points lower than what psychologist Lewis Terman had established 30 years earlier. Suddenly—due to the act of moving a line on a graph—there were a great many more “gifted” students. This shift dramatizes the arbitrary nature of matching score to label. Why not 125 or 135 instead? The stakes are even higher on the other side of the bell curve: people with an IQ score of 72, for example, might be denied the support and services that accompany a diagnosis of “intellectually disabled” if the cutoff is 70. Or, alternatively, they might escape forced sterilization if they happened to live in Oregon before 1981. (Oregon was the last state to uphold the practice.) The story of eugenics, IQ tests, and education is, then, about who gets the best opportunities and who gets discriminated against, all in the name of commensuration.
TITLE: Maga’s era of ‘soft eugenics’: let the weak get sick, help the clever breed
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/may/04/maga-soft-eugenics
EXCERPT: At the heart of all Trump administration policies is ‘soft eugenics’ thinking – the idea that if you take away life-saving services, then only the strong will survive
English polymath Francis Galton formulated the concept of eugenics in 1883. Inspired by animal breeding, Galton encouraged people with “desirable” traits to procreate while discouraging or preventing those with “undesirable” traits from doing the same. As social and intellectual qualities were hereditarily “fixed”, he thought some groups were naturally superior. Galton constructed a racial hierarchy, with white Europeans at the top.
Eugenics has since played out in varying, always tragic ways. Attempted genocides and forced sterilization are first to mind, though the 20th century brought about the concept of soft eugenics: non-coercive methods of reducing certain conditions through individual choice and medical advice. Popularized in Nancy Stepan’s 1991 book, The Hour of Eugenics, “soft” eugenics is accomplished by indirect, environmental, and educational interventions while “hard” eugenics is marked by direct biological interventions (such as sterilization). The term has since been expanded in discussions of genetic technologies, prenatal screenings, and physical fitness.
Enter Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US secretary of health, who regularly laments over the “back then” of his youth when he says that diabetes and autism was almost unheard of and obesity rates were far lower. (In his campaign videos he would often do this over vintage footage of white bodies splayed on a beach.) Kennedy champions living harmoniously with nature, free from the burdens of “poisonous” food additives, fertilizers, cooking oils and the most toxic chemistry of all: vaccines.
Kennedy’s myopic emphasis on personal responsibility as the main driver of health means he’s at best indifferent, and at worst welcoming, of the idea that those that don’t heed his counsel might die.
Yet health is never simple. By avoiding discussion of education, employment, social support networks, economic status and geographic location – the social determinants that public health experts agree influence health outcomes – Kennedy, in lockstep with top wellness influencers, is practicing soft eugenics.
He’s not the only member of the Trump administration to do so. The increasing frenzy around immigration seems fueled by the desire to shape the population’s genetic makeup. Elon Musk’s cuts to foreign aid are already leading to increased child mortality and HIV and malaria cases in Africa (the Trump administration’s other main policy engagement with Africa has been offering white South Africans refugee status).
At the heart of all these policies is soft eugenics thinking – the idea that if you take away life-saving healthcare and services from the vulnerable, then you can let nature take its course and only the strong will survive.
TITLE: RFK Jr.’s War on Autistic People is Eugenics With a New Face
https://psuvanguard.com/rfk-jr-s-war-on-autistic-people-is-eugenics-with-a-new-face/
EXCERPTS: The loaded language Kennedy uses to talk about autism—now the official language of the Department of Health and Human Services—is meant to imply, falsely, that autism is a preventable disease rather than a heritable developmental disability.
Speaking at an April 16 press conference, Kennedy said many “fully functional” children had “regressed […] into autism when they were 2 years old. And these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
At the same press conference, Kennedy said, “autism destroys families,” calling it an “individual tragedy as well.”
Writing as one of those grown-up children, I can report somewhat begrudgingly that I am gainfully employed, and a few weeks ago I even did my own taxes and everything, just like a big boy. I’ve written quite a few poems, and while they’ve never seemed to help with my love life, you know, I try my best in that department. I have to admit I’ve never liked baseball, but I was a decent midfielder on my elementary school soccer team—and, last I checked, I’m able to use the bathroom perfectly fine, thank you.
I’m probably not the kind of person Kennedy’s referring to, however.
“Most cases now are severe,” Kennedy said. “Twenty-five percent of the kids who are diagnosed with autism are nonverbal, non-toilet-trained, and have other stereotypical features.”
First, let’s clear something up—the word “most” means “greatest in quantity, extent, or degree,” or “the majority of,” as in, “most of the country disapproves of President Trump’s handling of the economy” and “most of what RFK Jr. says about autism is bullshit.” Twenty-five percent, on the other hand, is in fact just over twenty-five percent short of a majority—Secretary Kennedy, if you’re reading this, that would be fifty percent plus one—and, well, I’m concerned about the HHS Secretary having, at best, a tenuous grasp on middle school mathematics.
More seriously, the suggestion that autistic people with higher support needs—including those who are nonverbal, unable to maintain employment, or unable take care of themselves—are “afflicted” by a “preventable disease” is eugenicist nonsense, and it shifts the focus away from effective treatment and accommodation toward a much darker line.
Of course, Kennedy and his supporters would say that it can’t be eugenics—genes have nothing to do with it, they claim. Kennedy has a long history of sidelining the genetic causes of autism in favor of his own conspiracy theories, including the thoroughly debunked claim that vaccines cause autism (they don’t), the idea that autism is caused by an “environmental toxin” (it isn’t), and that “better awareness of autism cannot be driving a disability like autism to increase by 300% in 20 years” (yes it can, what do you think the word “awareness” means?).
According to the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, there is “no evidence that children can develop autism after early fetal development as a result of exposure to vaccines or postnatal toxins.”
Autism is hereditary, and around 80% of cases are linked with inherited genetic mutations, with the remaining 20% stemming from non-inherited mutations. Autism is, put simply, a genetic disorder—the only way to “prevent” autism would be to eliminate all autistic people from the gene pool.
Autism advocacy groups have loudly voiced their opposition to a proposed autism “registry,” including the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, which said in an April 23 statement that it was “gravely concerned by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s (RFK Jr.) reported plans to establish a ‘registry’ of autistic people and to hand over sensitive medical data about autistic people to unnamed researchers… given not only this administration’s deplorable, eugenic rhetoric about autism, but its demonstrated disregard for basic standards of scientific evidence, there is every reason to believe that this data will be misused in troubling and dangerous ways.”
HHS recently walked back National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya’s comments that the institute would create a “national disease registry,” stating in an email to CBS News, “We are not creating an autism registry. The real-world data platform will link existing datasets to support research into causes of autism and insights into improved treatment strategies.”
This may or may not be true—there’s little reason to trust this administration, especially on such a high-stakes issue. The fact that such a proposal was even floated is a problem, and taken with Secretary Kennedy’s comments on autism and the general secrecy and cruelty regularly meted out by the Trump administration, it’s not hard to see this as a strategic retreat before a second attempt down the road.
There is no logical end-point for Kennedy’s autism obsession other than a policy of eugenics. Kennedy claims that HHS is “assembling teams of world-class scientists to focus research on the origins of the epidemic, and we expect to begin to have answers by September”—when that research reaffirms decades of genetic findings, what then? Or will they even bother with “research” at all?
Autistic people with high support needs are most at risk, but all autistic people should be alarmed by the government’s newfound focus on the disorder. In fact, everyone should keep their eyes open to what’s happening, because a threat to one of us is a threat to all of us—and even if you’re not autistic, you might still be in the crosshairs next.