Transcript
EPISODE 11: The Most Dangerous Thing
Donald Trump Believes
Interview
Susanna Smith
Hi everyone. This is Genetic Frontiers. A podcast about the promise, power and perils of genetic information find us wherever podcasts are found and go to geneticfrontiers.org to join the conversation about how genetic discoveries are propelling new personalized medical treatments, but also posing ethical dilemmas and emotional quandaries. I'm your host, Susanna Smith.
This season we’re focusing on Genetics in American Politics & Culture. We talk with historians, journalists, technologists and philosophers about the alluring but dangerous pursuit of improving the human species through genetics. We discuss how ideas about people’s genetic worth and worthiness are driving American politics and policy today.
On today's episode I will be talking with Dr. Sue Currell, who is a former senior lecturer in American literature at the University of Sussex in the UK. Professor Currell is also a past chair of the British Association for American Studies. Her research and writing focuses on the American identity and ideas about the modern self. She's written a number of books and articles on cultural ideas of leisure and efficiency and also about the eugenics movement, which sought to improve communities and even nations by controlling who did and did not have children. Eugenics started as an elite, pseudoscientific field but went mainstream becoming a part of American pop culture in the 20th century with Better Babies Campaigns and Fitter Families Contests.
Professor Currell doesn't typically write about politics, however, she was asked to contribute an essay to a volume called “(Re)Considering American Eugenics.” While researching this season I read Professor Currell 's essay, which is called, “ ‘This May Be the Most Dangerous Thing Donald Trump Believes’: Eugenic Populism and the American Body Politic.” And frankly, it triggered an aha! moment for me and has completely changed how I think about American politics today and how the topic of genetics keeps bubbling up in conversations about immigration, education, race, gender, disability, and the list goes on.
Professor Currell 's essay was originally published in 2019. She and I sat down to record this episode soon after President Trump took office for the second time in January of 2025. But this conversation about how eugenic thinking pervades American culture is just as relevant today, and perhaps all the more pressing as we all try to make sense of the dramatic transformation of the United States, which is currently underway.
So thank you, Professor Currell for joining me today on Genetic Frontiers.
Professor Currell
Thank you.
Susanna Smith
We're going to start today by having you read an excerpt from your essay that I mentioned, “This May Be the Most Dangerous Thing Donald Trump Believes.” Please go ahead.
Professor Currell
“Trump's lifelong belief in his genetic superiority and thereby the truth of eugenics more broadly, it's easy to dismiss as just mere scientific ignorance and arrogance a fringe idea, which pales in importance beside his policy goals and actions on segregation, deportation and walls and immigration, restriction or his self declared beliefs in female feebleness, their weakness and innate inability to govern.
Yet the failure to properly debate and dismiss eugenic ideology illustrates that the problem goes further than Donald Trump. It shows that a wide-ranging eugenic ideology is embedded in the broader American body politic, one that spans political, social, and religious divisions. It's important, then, that scholars help us to remember and understand the past, making visible the widespread afterlife of eugenics apparent in America today.
Eugenic beliefs are present across the political spectrum because they do not threaten the power structure in place, but instead emanate from them. As such Progressives also contribute to the legitimacy of the discourse. Eugenic assessments of human value and worth have been embedded in policy and media discussions concerning the environment, intelligence, beauty, fitness, obesity, ageing, and poverty across the political spectrum.
The presence of modernist left-wing eugenics in reform and welfare culture throughout the 1930s led to the paradox of right-wing politicians accusing Democrats of enacting eugenic policy in our present time. Conservatives have argued, for example, that Obamacare, birth control and women's right to choose is another form of predatory state eugenics, and they often use Margaret Sanger, the feminist founder of the Birth Control movement, and a virulent eugenicist herself as evidence of this historical legacy.
The bio-political use of welfare to impose eugenic sterilizations throughout the post-war period in America and into the 1980s has not been a solely right-wing agenda. As Angela Davis has pointed out, Davis showed that in the post-war period the focus of forced sterilisations switched from poor white subjects to Mexican and Black women welfare recipients.America's mass incarceration of a disproportionate number of young, Black and immigrant male bodies, intensified border control and racial profiling as well as problematic environmental concerns with overpopulation and migration long pre-existed the Trump presidency.
More work needs to be done to assess the eugenic legacy of neo-liberalism, which has made it possible for eugenic ideology to remain alive in American popular culture. The eugenic imagination in America is and has been in the past an enduring and popular byproduct of capitalism and a biopolitical strategy to, “Make America Great Again”: it has its grip on everyday life, and the American body politic, and represents a human rights catastrophe as well as a political failure to imagine a world where value is not profit.
My research into the popular eugenic rhetoric of the 1930s has led to several conclusions: that even when scientifically disproven, a popular narrative can get stronger; that the eugenic imaginary is not an extreme fringe belief, but is embedded in everyday ideas, such as the quantifiability, value, or desirableness of genius or cleverness; that the eugenic fiction appears to make a person deserving of the power that they already hold; and that eugenics is the backbone of political control in a progressive meritocracy.
In times of economic and social stress, eugenic discourse presents an easy and typically American remedy that feeds from and into mainstream ideals of progress while hiding its power and fabrications behind a facade of scientific objectivity and hopes for the future.”
Susanna Smith
Thank you, Professor Currell , for sharing some of your work with our listeners.
There are so many big ideas in this essay, and I just want to reflect a few of the points that you shared back for our listeners. So one was, even when scientifically disproven, a popular narrative can get stronger.
You also said that the grip of eugenic ideas on American politics today is a political failure to imagine a world where value is not profit.
And lastly, the one that really jumped out to me was eugenics is the backbone of political control and a progressive meritocracy. I want to just pause for a moment and let that sink in.
So I want to think back to President Trump's inaugural address, in which he laid out some big ideas himself. In that speech he made a commitment to forge a society that is colorblind, merit-based, and only has two genders. How should we understand this agenda in light of the eugenic history of the United States?
Professor Currell
Well, I think it was a very popular appeal. I mean, it's very, who doesn't want to have a merit-based, colorblind society? Most politicians would argue that that was something that they would want. I think it also at the same time he was referring to Martin Luther King Jr., which I found very interesting. I think the inaugural was actually on Martin Luther King Day so he kind of tapped into that. So I think it was a broad appeal there to non-white Americans, but I also felt that that was very much in keeping, in many ways, with the way he taps into that popular eugenic rhetoric.
And what I mean by that is that in the 1930s utopias also looked forward to a future that was a meritocracy but merit was based on the idea of who was fittest to be part of society. And so when you talk about meritocracy, you have to think about who defines who has merit, who is worthy of being kind of put forward and leading in society. And what happens to those who aren't seen as having merit, if you see what I mean. So I've looked at a number of eugenic utopian fictions in the 1930s that also looked forward to this meritocracy. And yet very often race has been eliminated in those, and there is only one language, and couples get assigned child quotas based on their eugenic fitness. And I think that's very much a part of this kind of long-term ideal of a meritocracy is that actually, you have to sort of in some ways eliminate people or leave out those who are not fit enough to be part of meritocracy. So I think it has a broad appeal, and has had in the past as well.
So again, you have to think who is defining merit? Is it someone like Elon Musk? And then you get a future in which power and privilege looks very similar to what it does today?
Susanna Smith
Right? I could see that.
So how are you making sense of this focus on the gender binary, and whether it has a relationship to eugenic ideologies?
Professor Currell
The two gender statement indicates a deep fear of non-binary sexualities that is explicitly related to eugenic thinking. Most people know about negative eugenics, especially as it manifested in Nazi Germany. Fewer people consider the flip side of that, which has been called positive eugenics or pronatalism. It's a pseudoscience really of better breeding.
Most see this as a more benign side of eugenics, and many would even support it rather than see it as a dangerous legacy of negative eugenics. But pronatalism is imbued with value judgments about who is entitled or expected or even allowed to breed, and as a consequence, policies can act to discipline a wide variety of communities. So in a way, that kind of ideology of pronatalism is, and that idea of like only having these two very strictly defined genders is a form of policing the gender norms that create the kind of ideal pronatalist environment.
You've got Elon Musk, for example, and he's known for his pronatalist stance where he believes those who he defines as intelligent, particularly himself, should have more babies to improve the nation. But also because he thinks the intelligent, and this is often very much people like him, are dying out and being swamped by what he calls an idiocracy. So that perceived threat to the individual and the nation of a low IQ population has led to mass sterilizations in the past in many countries, not just in America, but also leads to prescriptive policies around gender behaviour and gender norms.
So Trump mentioned Teddy Roosevelt and winning the wild west in his inaugural speech, nostalgically reviving ideologies of manliness and conquering the West and eugenic supremacy where gender norms were policed. So it celebrates going forward by looking back to an era of racist segregation and even genocide. And to me it raises the question of what will happen to anyone who does not identify as one of the two genders now permissible. How is this to be measured and monitored and policed? So it raised a lot of red flags for me.
Susanna Smith
Yes, and the same for me. I think it's a big question we're all asking every day, “How will this actually be enacted?”
So I want to turn to another area in which you've done a lot of work ,which is the topic of efficiency in the 20th century. Can you talk a bit from what you know of the history of efficiency in the United States, and how you're thinking about this new Department of Government Efficiency, which is helmed by Elon Musk?
Professor Currell
“The Department of Government Efficiency,” I mean, it could almost have been written by George Orwell, that title, actually. It's quite bizarre, but it does raise a huge amount of red flags to me.
When I was working on popular eugenics in the 1930s, one of the key things that kept coming up was this idea of improving national efficiency. This was something that was embedded into the kind of creation of the welfare state in many respects. During that period, national efficiency was strongly tied to ideas emanating from the eugenics movement at the time. It became a popular way of imagining a better and more streamlined future for America in very dark times. So around that time people were thinking that the Great Depression manifested or made manifest the decline and descent of humankind that had been predicted by eugenesists for the previous two decades.
In the United States, the economy was stagnant. But it also looked as if the population was also stagnant. There's popular metaphors of national sickness and disease and it could be argued that Trump's first inaugural also painted a similar set of fears of the American carnage, as he called it, released by uncontrolled migration and welfare. So there's this kind of dystopian kind of imaginary that's being kind of floated around all the time.
And so, in order to sort of prevent that, society has to improve two things. You either improve people or you take away the people who can't be improved. And those two things become kind of embedded into policies. Populists today target immigration, in particular, for this reason: it's a very quick fix to national problems that are, in fact, the creation of policies of the super-rich or powerful. It enables the target of people's anger to be moved away from the rich or the people in control, or the politicians, and it moves that target towards foreign arrivals and victims of failed states.
In the 1930s, national efficiency really referred to strategies of human management intended to maximise the nation's resources in terms of economic and labor productivity. It also referred to improving the quality of the future population, because if you didn't improve the future population you couldn't improve the economic and labor productivity. And I think this is why it's such an appealing ideology to the kind of power people in power today. The ideology of efficiency often appears then alongside the terminology of hygiene such as “social hygiene” and around these ideas of tidying up of the waste in the system. The term “racial hygiene" was a term, which referred to creating a stronger populace through better health and welfare but it also aimed to eliminate those from the system or to eliminate the waste products from the system. The term “unfit” was applied to those deemed unable to positively contribute to the nation's economy as well as to genetic inheritance and such eugenic propaganda played on public concerns about economic waste, national economic waste, in order to strengthen policies that would eliminate those who were, to quote from the 1930s, “ born to be a burden on the rest.”
Trump has a tendency to apply this idea of human waste to communities that he also wishes to control. Back in 2018 he referred to Haiti and El Salvador and other African countries more generally and he asked, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”
And in the 1920s, this really kind of chimed with me with some of the work that I've looked at rhetoric in the 1920s and 1930s, similar scatological language was used to define the dysgenic, or those who are considered as waste products, even that term “white trash.” You're looking at the waste products of society, those who are inefficient, who are holding everybody else back. So there's that idea of lag, of people dragging the rest of society down, certain types of people. So efficiency is often tied up with this idea of cleaning up human waste.
Trump spoke of a clean up in Gaza, which observers have pointed out sounds like ethnic cleansing. It's very much part of his ideology of efficiency, cleaning out waste, making sure that the detritus has gone, and then putting something utopian in its place. And to him there's no problem with that. There's no sense of the history of that kind of cleansing and efficiency.
So the Office of Efficiency, headed by the unelected, self-confessed supporter of far right ideology sets off a lot of alarm bells, not because I think that governments can't improve how they operate or make taxpayer savings and that kind of thing, but because of what and who is considered as the waste product to be eliminated from the system. The rhetoric has such a loaded history within eugenic ideology.
Susanna Smith
So one thing I wanted to pick your brain about is just this word “rhetoric,” which I think is kind of used often in academic circles but ultimately, what we mean by that is like the words we're using to frame a story.
What is the story politicians are telling us? And what is the story we're telling ourselves? And so based on your historical knowledge of how this story has been presented to people before, what is the story? What is the story we're being fed? And what is the real story?
Professor Currell
The story is that I suppose there's two sides to this. There's the story, the positive story, there's the story that society can be made great again can be, you know, everyone can contribute. And you know everyone can have health and wealth and well-being. So there's the positive story being told there.
But on the negative side of that is how do you get to that? How do you get to that Utopia? And very often the way you might do that is to stop the people who you feel aren't going to contribute to that perfect future society to stop them from continuing to have children or to be in your environment. So you can kind of put up walls, or you might segregate, or you might prevent them from breeding by incarcerating them. You might try to stop them breeding in other ways.
There's also this idea that in some ways, if everyone had a high IQ and was physically abled, society would be a much better place. There is that story, a kind of perfectionism that's being told there. And on the negative side of that you could say, well, that doesn't value people who don't fit into that criteria. It doesn't value people who might have some form of disability or some form of, or even as in most cases in eugenics, really, it comes down to economic privilege.
So in some senses there's a very deep class problem here like embedded in the system or embedded in the story. Where those who are considered worthy are those who are already considering themselves to be worthy.
Susanna Smith
So I want to turn our attention to a part of the essay in which you wrote that, “Trump is likely to frame himself as an anti-eugenicist and the protector of people with disabilities, minorities, and the pro-life community.” Let's tease that out a little bit. How would you describe Trump's relationship to disability rights?
Professor Currell
In terms of Trump's relationship to disability rights, I think it's hard to see Trump as empathetic to disabled people. There are so many examples that I could draw on here but to just highlight a few, his speeches around physical strength and IQ are very ablest. He's renowned for his disdain of the disabled. So there was a very notorious example where he mocked a disabled journalist during the 2016 election campaign. And then last summer, Trump's nephew claimed that he had said that his disabled son and similar patients with intellectual disabilities should be allowed to die, should be left to die. Basically, he said Trump reported as saying, “The shape they're in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should die.”
Now obviously Trump would deny that conversation and has suggested that he's done a lot for the disabled particularly he will refer to making his buildings accessible, for example. But some of the titles of the books that he's published are very telling in terms of his attitude towards disability. So one is titled, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again. And in those works what is highlighted is the cost of disability support as an obstacle to getting America back into economic shape.
So he has claimed in those books that $25 billion are eaten up in fraudulent social security filings. And the idea that rescinding equal rights is part of making America great again, it's blatant disability discrimination but is framed in economic terms as uncrippling America from welfare costs.
Something that happened recently, there was an air disaster in Washington, D.C. Before any research had been done into the causes of the crash, he had been blaming the affirmative action that had been taken, and he actually referred to mental impairment and dwarfism and that kind of thing in his speech when he was talking about that plane crash. So he very much sees America is being held back by disability in many, many respects.
One other thing that was interesting to me is that Elon Musk's business Neuralink is being lauded as curing disabilities through microchip implants into the brain. And now this is obviously a pioneering science, and might transform a disabled person's life. But again, it's fraught with problematic implications.
I think what I wanted to emphasize is that it's the terms of engagement that aren't being challenged here around discourses of normality and being able and what consists of health.
So the same slurs are also being used by Trump's opponents to attack and dismiss Trump. People have called Donald Trump someone with dementia, or that he can't read, “imbecile,” “moron.” All of those kinds of slurs have failed to challenge the terms of debate in any form.
Susanna Smith
Yeah, and I think these are terms drawn straight out of eugenics. And they were actually scientific or pseudoscientific terms used for people, to classify people with different forms of mental disabilities or intellectual disabilities.
Susanna Smith
So we've seen the rollback of reproductive rights across the United States, and of course Roe v. Wade was struck down. So can you talk about the complicated histories of eugenics and abortion rights. How you think this is influencing America today?
Professor Currell
Sure, yeah, in the 1930s the Catholic Church was pretty much the only institution to argue against eugenics. And today it's not difficult for the anti-abortion movement to argue that they are anti-eugenics, and that the state mandates around reproductive medical care are a form of modern eugenic control.
My students were quite shocked to learn that Margaret Sanger, who, I mentioned earlier, was a pioneer of birth control in the 1920s and 1930s and was a fervent eugenicist. Based on her experiences in the slums, she advocated for greater access to birth control and rational family planning, which led her to strongly support eugenic policies. At the time eugenicists loved her activism, and in turn she utilized their support for her campaigns. So the racist, classist, and ableist rhetoric is unbearable to read for women's rights activists. Planned Parenthood has a good summary and disclaimer on their website about this.
But I think, rather than focusing on abortion what really needs to be looked at is the current trend of pronatalism among elites. And you have again, I mentioned this earlier, but Elon Musk fears that intelligent couples are in danger of dying out because they're not breeding enough. He said that if each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that's bad, he fears population collapse. And this parallels the eugenicists of the 1930s that the wrong people were outbreeding the right people.
At the same time, Musk sees it as his prerogative to define and label who is, and who isn't, fit to breed. And this again taps into this use of IQ or educational attainment. So this isn't the first generation to create this kind of arbitrary classification of humans using psychometric testing and data and the belief in measurement as an effective form of classifying human worth. It's a key feature of elitist thinking.
Susanna Smith
A lot of our listeners are medical professionals or researchers or academics. And some of them may be trying to stay above the political fray but how do you think they should be thinking about the role of science, in particular genetics, in America today?
Professor Currell
Yeah, I think it's a real concern for hardworking scientists and researchers that their work is getting reduced down to the kind of social priorities that have more in common with the 19th century than the 21st century.
The beliefs of Donald Trump and people like Elon Musk are really stuck in quite a basic Darwinian loop. And yet they're allowed to control this populist narrative around genetic superiority or inferiority. And you know they have a lot of control over the funding streams for medical research as well. So while the science might be way ahead and not necessarily part of this 19th century Darwinian survivalist ideology, I do think it's a real problem for scientists.
It's not the fault of scientists but I think scientists and researchers working in the area of genetics particularly need to keep informed and to keep informing others about the bad roads taken in the past in the name of science and that might help to resist a repeat of the deep harms that these beliefs have inflicted in the past.
Susanna Smith
Thank you Professor Currell for joining me today on Genetic Frontiers. For anyone listening who would like to read Professor Currell 's essay, “This May Be the Most Dangerous Thing Donald Trump Believes.” check out the link in our show notes.
Genetic Frontiers is co-produced by Brandy Mello and by me: Susanna Smith. Music is by Edward Giordano and design by Abhinav Chauhan and Julie Weinstein. Thank you for listening to this episode of Genetic Frontiers connect with us at geneticfrontiers.org or on Instagram and Linkedin at Genetic Frontiers, to continue the conversation. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to support our independent production. Please make a donation to Genetic Frontiers through our Patreon account.