Donald Trump’s Racism Mirrors Jeffrey Epstein’s (Clarence Lusane, April 16, 2026, Fair Observer)
Reporters culling the most recently released Epstein files discovered numerous pieces of evidence in emails and other documents suggesting that he advocated the faux “science” of racial eugenics and held racist views not distinct from those Trump promoted for decades. Epstein built (or at least tried to build) ties and developed friendships with some of the most notorious eugenicists and white nationalists around the globe, including Nobel Prize laureate and geneticist James Watson, political scientist Charles Murray and artificial intelligence researcher Joscha Bach, among many others. He also circulated posts from white supremacist websites that promoted bogus, supposedly genetically-based intellectual differences between the races.
Eugenics is the “race science” that was developed in the latter part of the 19th century to justify European slavery and colonialism. Proponents contended that humans were biologically and genetically separated into distinctly unequal “races.” Everything from intelligence, criminality and attractiveness to morality was, so the claim went, genetically determined. It should surprise no one that, in such an imagined hierarchy, whites were at the top and, in most configurations, people of African descent at the very bottom, with Asians and indigenous people somewhere in between. Those four (or five or six) categories were considered immutable. And it mattered remarkably little that, for a long time, social and natural scientists had overwhelmingly argued with irrefutable evidence that racial categories were social constructs invented by humans and distinctly malleable over time as political and social life changed.
The real-world impact of racial eugenics theory long shaped public policy, political status and life opportunities. In the United States, a belief in the genetic inferiority of blacks helped foster slavery and then Jim Crow segregation, and led to tens of thousands of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and individuals with physical and mental disabilities, as well as prisoners being sterilized. By 1913, 24 states and Washington, DC, had passed laws allowing enforced sterilization. President Theodore Roosevelt was a firm believer in such eugenics and supported sterilization in order to prevent what he termed “racial suicide,” a perspective that echoes today’s “Great Replacement Theory.”
In Nazi Germany, eugenics led not only to the sterilization of Jews, blacks and the disabled, but to the state-organized mass murder of millions of people. It was a core tenet of Nazism that all non-Aryans were genetically inferior and a threat to the white race. The Nazis railed against Jews “poisoning the blood” of white Germans, a term Trump used in describing non-white immigrants from the Global South.
Despite this history, Epstein came to deeply believe in eugenics and genetic determination, as has Trump.