“Bible of scientific racism”: The origins of Donald Trump’s obsession with genes

Donald Trump started his week on the campaign trail Monday talking about the “bad genes” carried by immigrants — just one of many comments he’s made in recent months that align genetic makeup with essential value as a human being. Grant was an aristocrat from New York who worked at the cutting edge of the eugenics movement by penning “The Passing of the Great Race” which became, in the words of his biographer Jonathan Spiro, “the Bible of Scientific Racism.” When it comes to the influencers who molded our nation’s racial consciousness and public policies, Grant and his movement have few equals during the first half of the 20th Century. Most importantly, no tolerance for immigrants could be allowed, for they would threaten the blood of “the master race” and the genetic fabric that undergirded America’s exceptionalism It was a message that took our nation by storm throughout the 1920s, inspiring the work of forced sterilization, radicalizing our nation’s segregationist policies through “one-drop” rules, robbing vulnerable people of governmental provisions and protections and nearly eliminating immigration from the 1920s through the mid-1960s. “The book,” wrote Adolf Hitler to Madison Grant, “has become my bible.” From slavery, through the Trail of Tears, and the lethal employment of segregation, Hitler long admired America’s racial politics. Donald Trump’s creed comes not from our nation’s founding documents but from the “bible of scientific racism” penned by the eugenicist Madison Grant.