NEED TO KNOW

• A Virginia university shooting and Michigan synagogue truck attack on Thursday prompted Trump’s remarks
• Scientists broadly reject the claim that violent behavior is genetically inherited or racially determined
• Trump has invoked similar genetic language about immigrants and crime repeatedly since at least 2023

WASHINGTON, DC (TDR) — A gunman killed a military instructor at Old Dominion University in Virginia on Thursday, and a man drove a truck into a synagogue and preschool in Michigan the same day — two attacks federal authorities are investigating as terrorism and targeted violence. In response, President Donald Trump told Fox News Radio that the attackers had bad “genetics,” drawing immediate criticism from civil rights advocates and scientists who called the framing a revival of eugenics, the long-discredited pseudoscience linking heredity to criminal behavior and racial hierarchy. The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

What Trump Said and What Prompted It

The comments came during a phone interview with Fox News Radio host Brian Kilmeade, responding to questions about two attacks that federal authorities are investigating as terrorism and targeted violence respectively.

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At Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, authorities identified the gunman as Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a former National Guard member with a prior terrorism conviction for supporting the Islamic State, who fatally shot an instructor before being killed by a cadet. In West Bloomfield, Michigan, Ayman Ghazali drove a truck into Temple Israel and its preschool, injuring a security officer before being shot dead. The FBI is investigating the synagogue attack as targeted violence against the Jewish community.

“They’re sick people, and a lot of them were let in here. They shouldn’t have been let in. Others are just bad. They go bad. Something wrong — there’s something wrong there. The genetics are not exactly, they’re not exactly your genetics.” — Donald Trump

Trump did not provide evidence connecting either attacker’s behavior to inherited biology. He acknowledged that law enforcement had to be “a little bit careful” because there were “a lot of good people too.”

A Pattern of Genetic Language

Friday’s remarks are not isolated. Trump has repeatedly invoked genetics when discussing immigration and crime. During the 2024 campaign, he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that the US had “a lot of bad genes” due to immigration. In December 2023, he described undocumented immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country,” language critics compared to Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric. At a White House Medal of Honor ceremony last week, Trump praised a soldier’s family by saying “the genetics in that family are very strong.”

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David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, pushed back directly on the framing.

“Trump is an old-school eugenicist nativist. He actually is fine with immigrants as long as they have the right ‘genes.'” — David J. Bier, Cato Institute

During the 2024 campaign, then-White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded to nearly identical Trump remarks by saying that type of language was “hateful, it’s disgusting, it’s inappropriate, it has no place in our country.” The Trump administration has since defended similar comments as focused on public safety, not race.

What Scientists Say

Modern genetics research does not support the claim that violent or criminal behavior is inherited through racial or ethnic lines. The Hastings Center, a nonpartisan bioethics research institution, has noted that genetic determinism of the kind Trump invokes has historically been used to justify immigration restrictions, forced sterilization and racial segregation, and is rejected by the mainstream scientific community.

Marielena Hincapié, an immigration scholar at Cornell University, has written that the failure to engage with the history of eugenics is directly linked to contemporary hostility toward immigrant communities. Growing scientific consensus, she argues, focuses instead on social determinants of behavior: economic conditions, access to mental health care, exposure to violence and systemic inequality.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations reported logging 8,683 anti-Muslim and anti-Arab complaints in 2025, the highest number since it began tracking data in 1996, and partially attributed the increase to the language and policies of the Trump administration.

Supporters and Critics Draw Different Lines

Defenders of Trump’s remarks argue that the president is speaking colloquially about individuals who have demonstrated violent intent and not making a clinical genetic claim. The Trump administration has previously stated that his “bad genes” comments referred specifically to murderers, not to immigrants broadly.

Critics, including civil rights organizations and members of Congress, contend the conflation is precisely the problem: that attributing violence to the inherited traits of a religiously or ethnically identifiable group, regardless of intent, reinforces targeting of those communities.

Both attacks Trump referenced involved Muslim perpetrators, and his response made no genetic distinction between individuals and the populations he implied they represent.

When a president attributes violent acts to the biology of a group rather than the choices of individuals, the question worth asking is not just whether the science holds up. What policies is such a framing designed to justify?

Sources

This report was compiled using information from NBC News, the Inquisitr, STAT News, the Hastings Center for Bioethics, PBS NewsHour, and Common Dreams.

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