When Trump talks 'bad genes' and 'racehorse theory,' he is telling us who he is

^{“Donald Trump” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.}

Donald Trump's fascination with genetics, especially his own "good genes" of the white European sort, as well as the "bad genes" of the you-know-which types, has always been creepy. I won't compare him to Hitler; I leave that to historians and JD Vance.

Here's Vance in 2016, before Trump's election: Writing to a former Yale Law classmate, Vance mused, "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a—hole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad … or that he's America's Hitler."

Trump's obsession with genes is disturbing enough for signaling his belief in the long-discredited, racist theory of eugenics, the idea (embraced most famously by the Nazis) that selective breeding — eliminating undesirables — can improve a nation's population. The former president is unabashed in spreading his belief in "racehorse theory," the human version.

Often he merely brags in passing about his own superior breeding. "I mean it's a good gene pool right there," he once said, pointing at his head, to NBC's Lester...