Vice President Kamala Harris must—not should, but must—be elected President of the United States next month. If this was ever in doubt, former President Donald Trump's relentless revival of dangerous conspiracy theories rooted in racial pseudoscience makes it crystal clear.
I never met my grandparents or my brother, my mother’s son, because they were murdered in an Auschwitz gas chamber, victims of the same kind of vile pseudoscience Trump now echoes.
Recently, Trump said, "You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it's in their genes," in reference to undocumented immigrants. He followed up by claiming, "We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now." Given Trump’s inability to differentiate between the genetic makeup of an undocumented immigrant and their family who may have entered legally, it’s evident that he’s broad-brushing all immigrants with this dangerous rhetoric.
This isn’t an isolated incident. In December, Trump told a New Hampshire rally that immigrants from "all over the world" were "poisoning the blood of our country." These statements expose Trump as a race-baiter at best, and a crypto-fascist at worst.
However, we don’t need to reach back to Nazi Germany to see where Trump’s ideology comes from. He taps into a deep-seated American tradition of targeting outsiders—an ideology that predates even Adolf Hitler. In fact, on December 20, 1922, The New York Times reported speculation that American industrialist Henry Ford was financing Hitler's nationalist and anti-Semitic movement in Munich. This article, one of the first mentions of Hitler in American press, noted that Ford's anti-Semitic writings were prominently displayed in Hitler’s Munich headquarters.
Ford, who propagated conspiracy theories about Jews through his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, influenced Hitler’s views, which would later appear in *Mein Kampf*. Hitler mirrored Ford’s claims, portraying Jews as threats to racial purity—an idea that shaped the Nazi agenda of racial extermination.
Trump's racist rhetoric, therefore, isn’t innovative; it draws from a shameful American past, including Jim Crow laws and anti-miscegenation statutes that once served as templates for Nazi laws. Legal frameworks that discriminated against Jews under Nazi control were inspired by American segregationist policies, a connection examined by Yale Law professor James Q. Whitman in his book, *Hitler's American Model*.
While Trump’s rhetoric echoes this dark tradition, it's crucial to remember that even as the Third Reich fell in 1945, interracial marriage was still illegal in 30 U.S. states. It wasn’t until 1967 that the Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, struck down these laws.
Trump's race-baiting mirrors the same hatred Ford spread and Hitler adopted, but he has managed to exploit these ideas in modern America. His racist comments find a receptive audience today. If Trump truly believes bad behavior is genetic, he might want to reflect on his father, Fred Trump, who was arrested (though not charged) at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927.
In this context, electing Kamala Harris is more than just a political choice—it’s a necessity to reject this legacy of hate.
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