Many people were shocked to read allegations last year by Donald Trump’s nephew, Fred Trump III, about his uncle: Fred, whose son William has intellectual and developmental disabilities, reported that the elder Trump said during his first presidential term that people like William should “just die.”
That is shocking—but it’s not surprising. The comment falls into a pattern of eugenicist and ableist views that Trump has espoused all the way back to the 1980s, when he spoke openly about the importance of having “the right genes” in an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
The opposition’s failure to address and confront Trump’s eugenicist views, the American studies scholar Susan Currell wrote in a 2019 article, “shows that a wide-ranging eugenic ideology is embedded in the broader American body politic.” The lack of emphasis on Trump’s comments and record around disability and genetics bears that out. Trump makes a lot of outrageous statements—but there’s a pattern to his comments about intelligence (or lack thereof), his intense hostility towards disabled people (including reputed public use of the r-word stretching back decades), and his preoccupation with “good” genes: it’s inseparable from his constant promotion of Afrikaner and Northern European immigration, sympathy to claims of “white genocide,” and promotion of close advisors like Stephen Miller and Elon Musk.
Taken together, that track record illustrates the sitting president’s eugenicist mindset—one that comes into sharp focus in the timeline below.
1980
A former vice president in charge of construction at the Trump Organization alleged in an opinion piece that Trump shouted, “Get rid of the [expletive] braille. No blind people are going to live in Trump Tower,” when an architect showed Trump the planned interior of a new elevator.
1999
Trump’s great-nephew William is born with complex disabilities. Despite Trump’s physical proximity, he never bothered to meet William in person—and still hasn’t to this day, Fred Trump III told Mother Jones.
2011
Deaf actress and Academy Award winner Marlee Matlin placed second on Celebrity Apprentice. The Daily Beast reported that Trump had made an ableist comment about her deafness to her face, in footage that did not air, and called her “r-tarded” behind her back.
In his book Time to Get Tough: Make America #1 Again, Trump wrote that Social Security disability claims—specifically, that “one out of every twenty people in America now claims disability”—stood in the way of making America great. (That figure is actually quite low, considering around that one in four American adults has a disability.)
2017
Trump claimed that his Cabinet members, yet to be confirmed, had “by far the highest IQ of any Cabinet ever assembled.”
Axios reported that Trump physically mocked both Kentucky Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, who has long-term health issues related to polio, and the late Sen. John McCain, who has disabilities related to the torture he experienced as a prisoner of war.
2018
During a trip to Singapore, Trump lauded his uncle, late MIT physicist John Trump, as someone with “good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart.”
After the GOP’s failure to repeal part of the Affordable Care Act, Trump approved a Justice Department commitment not to pursue health insurers for failing to cover appropriate care for people with pre-exisiting conditions, which includes all disabled people.
2019
Trump appointed his former physician, Ronny Jackson, to be his chief medical advisor after Jackson said that Trump had “good genes.”
Trump branded journalists “degenerate Trump haters”—language that, as my colleague Mark Follman wrote in 2019, “historically has connotations of eugenics and Nazi propaganda.”
2025
After January’s fatal plane crash near Reagan Airport in Washington, Trump seemed to blame disabled FAA workers for the collision, rattling off a list of the disabilities he claimed the agency had allowed air traffic controllers to have in a speech that centered on a fixation with “naturally talented geniuses.”
In his first day in office, Trump rolled back diversity, equity, and inclusion programs established under Biden to seek to hire more disabled people, people of color, and LGBTQ people—all of whom face discrimination in hiring processes—into federal positions.
On March 20, Trump signed an executive order—that a judge later blocked—to hollow out the Department of Education, in what he hopes will be a prelude to its complete dismantling. Programs for disabled students have been set to be moved to the Department of Health and Human Services, itself contending with massive, sweeping cuts under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has promoted disinformation about vaccines and autism, among other disabilities.
