A central component of the ideological foundation of the fascist movement in the United States that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is building is extreme nationalism. A main pillar of this is increasingly overt racism based on the concept of the purported genetic inferiority of non-European populations.

In a recent interview with conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt, Trump reiterated his claim that immigrants are “criminals” who have “bad genes” that predispose them to commit murder. According to him, “You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” 

During a March rally in Ohio, Trump expressed his view regarding immigrants that, “In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion.”

Clearly echoing Adolf Hitler, Trump has repeatedly vilified immigrants seeking to enter the US as “animals,” “criminals” and “rapists” with “bad genes” that are “polluting” the nation’s “blood.” To the contrary, it is well documented that immigrants have a lower incidence of criminal activity than the US average. 

These openly racist characterizations are of a piece with the totally unsubstantiated claims by Trump and his vice-presidential running mate JD Vance that Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio have been killing and eating the pets of local residents.

This blatant lie has been comprehensively disproven, but the Republican presidential ticket continues to repeat it in order to denigrate not only Haitians, but all immigrants, as filthy and subhuman. Vance has indicated that even if the story is fabricated, it is useful to make a point, demonstrating the Trump campaign’s tenuous relationship with the truth. 

Trump subscribes to a genetically based, racist world view, based on the ideology of “race science,” a bogus pseudo-science which espouses a relative ranking of various “races” according to criteria supposedly based in genetics.

He has often boasted that he has superior genes that are the key to his self-proclaimed success, while denouncing his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as “a low IQ person—she’s a stupid person.” At a fundraising dinner with billionaires in Manhattan, Trump reportedly referred to Harris as a “retard.”

There is ample evidence that Trump is consciously and deliberately plagiarizing the language of Hitler and the Nazis. This is supported by reports from a variety of sources, including his first wife, that he kept a book containing copies of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside.

The fascist ideology of the supposed racial superiority of white, Western European populations was employed by the Nazis to justify the Holocaust and the war of extermination against the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Trump’s repeated pledge to conduct violent mass deportations of immigrants is a clear step towards that level of genocide. 

The extreme xenophobia of his campaign is expressed in the embrace by many of his ultra-right supporters of the “Great Replacement Theory,” which claims that a cabal of wealthy Jews and/or the Biden administration is purposely promoting foreign immigration of inferior peoples, which Trump has referred to as coming from “shithole” countries, in a sinister plot to overwhelm and subordinate the native US population. 

After the 2017 “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia, organized by extreme right-wing forces, who marched by torchlight carrying Nazi and Confederate flags and chanting the slogan “Jews will not replace us,” Trump commented that there were “good people on both sides.”

He was drawing an equivalence between the fascist demonstrators and the anti-fascist counter-demonstrators, only hours after anti-fascist Heather Heyer was murdered by a neo-Nazi who drove his car at high speed directly into a crowd of protesters.

Despite these filthy fascist lies, the most the Democrats can muster is mealy mouthed responses. For example, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre scolded, “That type of language is hateful, it’s disgusting, it’s inappropriate, and has no place in our country.” White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said, “It’s the opposite of everything we stand for as Americans.” Even when a fleeting reference is made to the danger of dictatorship if Trump is elected, as Biden did at the Democratic National Convention, there are no consequences. 

To the contrary, the US has a long, dark history of the use of racism and xenophobia as a tool used by the ruling class to divide and suppress the struggles of the working class. The Democrats promote racialism themselves, in the form of identity politics, which also divides the working class. 

It must be stated firmly that the whole concept of “race” is anti-scientific. There is absolutely no credible scientific basis for the contention that there are any consistent intellectual or behavioral differences between human populations, inaccurately characterized as “races.” The whole concept of race is a social construct with no scientific validity. The purported racial differences (e.g., skin color etc.) are entirely superficial. Human populations around the world have been migrating and intermixing for hundreds of millennia. There is, in fact, more genetic variation within “racial” groups than between them. 

The use of concepts that impute significant physical and/or intellectual differences between “racial” groups has a filthy history, extending back before the Nazis and underpinning the discredited “science” of eugenics. The implication of this pseudo-science holds that individuals with supposedly superior genetic endowment should not mix with inferior ones.

Furthermore, it holds that selective breeding can improve the human species. The corollary is that those with inferior genetic makeup should be kept subordinated or even removed from the gene pool (i.e., “culled from the herd”). A gruesome contemporary example is the ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which a high-ranking Israeli government official characterized Palestinians as “human animals,” hence legitimate targets for expulsion and extermination. 

The fact that such overt racism can be publicly advocated by Trump and his fascist followers during the current presidential campaign with nothing more than an occasional whimpering response from the Democrats, and their increasingly right-wing positions regarding immigrants, reflects their abandonment of any support for democratic rights, as shown in the campaign against anti-genocide protesters on college campuses. 

Given that this racist and fascist ideology is being promoted by significant sections of the capitalist class and increasingly downplayed or ignored by the rest, it cannot be fought by appealing to that very same class. Discrimination in all its forms, whether based on physical characteristics, religion or national origin, has long been a principal tool of the ruling class to divide and subjugate the working class. The only way forward is to bring to workers’ full consciousness the already inherent unity of the working class regardless of “racial,” ethnic, religious or other differences.