Those Jeans Genes, the Way They Move 

“You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it? Don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

—Donald Trump, Bemidji, Minnesota, September 18, 2020.

“The entire alt-right patiently awaits the day when we can lay down our swords and kneel before her throne […] as she commands us to go forth and slaughter the subhuman enemies of the Aryan race.”

—Andre Anglin, founder of Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, on Taylor Swift.

“Sydney Sweeney has great genes jeans.”

—American Eagle ad campaign.

Donald Trump has made no secret of his eugenicist leanings. When he’s not rambling about his “good brain,” he’s fixated on the “good genes” of his and others, and the “great stuff” that is his own “German blood.” He even convinced former White House physician Ronny Jackson that he possesses not just “incredible genes,” but “incredibly good genes.” These, apparently, are the same genes that endowed America’s X-Men president with an infallible memory and astounding auricular regenerative powers. Move over, Moondragon and Wolverine.

But Trump isn’t the only member of his clan allegedly blessed with miraculous DNA. He claims to share these super genes with his uncle John – or “Uncle Dr. John” as Trump fondly referred to him – M.I.T.’s “longest serving,” thrice-degreed professor and, according to Trump, instructor to the Harvard-educated Unabomber. Or so the delusional, fact-averse Übermensch would have us believe.

Trump’s obsession with genetic purity goes far beyond personal vanity. Drawing inspiration from Hitler’s speeches – reportedly his favored bedside reading – and the racist dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, he has pushed to preserve the nation’s genetic integrity by closing its borders to immigrants with “bad genes,” whom he claims are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Or perhaps, in the ever-shifting semantic stew that is MAGAese, he meant “bad jeans” – which might explain the 15% tariff he slapped on Lesotho, the “denim capital of Africa” that, in his words, “nobody has heard of.”

Yet Trump is merely a conduit of the zeitgeist. Six years ago, The Guardian reported on the resurgence of academic race “science,” a field that historically exists not to illuminate, but to reinforce and justify lay prejudices. The grim reality, however, is that race science has never truly been in remission, popping up like a perennial whack-a-mole whenever the cultural climate demands, which, tragically, is always.

Case in point: Some may recall Tom Brokow’s NBC News special “The Black Athlete Fact and Fiction” (April 25, 1989), which posed the question whether black^[1] athletic dominance is rooted in genetics, a question that, even then, seemed more like a provocation than a genuine inquiry. Jon Entine, who co-wrote and co-produced the segment with Brokow, later expanded its premise into his book 2000 book Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We are Afraid to Talk About It. In it, Entine argues that black athletic prowess is largely genetic, a claim the subtitle suggests is rarely discussed openly (unless, of course, it’s broadcast nationally). In fact, the subject is neither taboo nor particularly frightening – at least when white people broach it safely outside the presence of black people.

Or perhaps you recall another “taboo” topic that Americans are allegedly too “afraid” to confront: Charles A. Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve (1994), which spawned Ted Koppel’s Nightline town hall “I.Q. and Race” (October 21, 1994), ABC News’ response to the controversial 912-page national bestseller. An updated edition followed in 1996, perhaps in a bid to capture the dual lightning bolts of white supremacist race science in a bottle.

Tellingly, the Nightline episode opened with a graphic depicting an “I.Q. ladder that placed Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians at the top – above whites, Latinos, and blacks. Yet despite this visual hierarchy, the program focused squarely on alleged black – not white – “inferiority.”

The broadcast largely toed the line laid out by Murray and Herrnstein, offering cautious qualifications, disclaimers, and informed rebuttals, but ultimately providing a national platform for their claims. Notably, neither Murray, a political “scientist,” nor Herrnstein, an experimental psychologist, is a geneticist. Their combined expertise in the field arguably rivals that of Trump and Ronny Jackson.

While theories of black athletic superiority and intellectual deficiency remain a persistent thread in American racial discourse, the scope of these “scientific” inquiries is conspicuously narrow. No one demands genetic explanations for Chinese dominance in ping pong, nor do we see television panels dissecting how those at the top of the I.Q. ladder were once deemed intellectually inferior and barred from entering the U.S. by immigration quotas. Where are the nationally televised town halls on the disappearance of Jewish ballers from basketball, a sport they once dominated, and, according to some, even “ruled.” Why no 900-plus-page bestselling tomes unpacking Finnish supremacy in motorsports? Surely, if there is a “gene” for high-jumping and sprints, there must be one for speed and cornering at 200 mph.

Today, “tabooed” pseudoscience and white supremacism thrive online, flourishing on social media platforms and promoted by self-styled “racial realists” such as Jared Taylor on his website American Renaissance. More overtly extremist spaces such as Stormfront, The Daily Stormer, and Federale: The Fifth Columnist push these ideologies even further, openly and unapologetically propagating anti-black, antisemitic, transphobic neo-Nazi rhetoric.

Eugenics, however, has never been solely concerned with the elimination of inferior races. At its core, it targets all those deemed imperfect, burdensome, and detrimental to an imagined ethno-state composed of a “master race” whose genetic purity must be preserved and protected at all costs.

Trump’s eugenic inclinations do not stop at race. At a campaign rally, he notoriously mocked disabled journalist Serge Kovaleski, flailing his arms and jerking his body to imitate Kovaleski’s congenital condition, milking laughs from the crowd. According to Fred Trump III, Trump’s nephew and the father of a son born with a rare genetic disorder, Trump once told him after meeting with disability advocates, “Maybe those kinds of people [disabled Americans] should just die.” On another occasion, he bluntly said: “Maybe you should just let [your son] die and move down to Florida.”

These sentiments have since become policy: the Trump regime recently announced plans to cut costs to Supplementary Security Income (SSI), stripping benefits from nearly 400,000 low-income disabled Americans.

Empathy and eugenics do not mix – unless that empathy is reserved exclusively for the betterment of one’s own group. Elon Musk has denounced what he calls “civilizational suicidal empathy,” describing it as “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.”

As New York Times critic Jennifer Szalai has observed, empathy has become a contested concept in recent non-fiction, with several books treating it as “toxic” or a “sin.” Is it any wonder, then, that Trump and the religious right now cast themselves as holier than thou? In their holy war against agape, these culture crusaders cry out, “Praise God and pass the Big Beautiful Bill.” In their worldview, empathy isn’t a virtue, it’s a liability. And in the race for racial survival, compassion is for losers.

In Trumpland, empathy is dead, its corpse buried, unmarked, beside the grave of Ivana at Trump’s Bedminster golf course.

Eugenic orthodoxy demands that Trump’s obliterative DEI and budget policies impact not only “inferior,” “low-I.Q. individuals” of color, but also people with disabilities. Like skin color and non-heteronormative gender identity, disability is regarded as disqualification. Trump and his acolytes believe that disability is synonymous with incompetence. As his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, whom it would appear genetics has blessed with salaciously motile lips worthy of presidential praise, put it:

“People should not be hired based on their disabilities, based on their skin color, their gender, their race. None of that matters. What matters to this president and this administration is how well you can do your job, and the American people agree with that sentiment. So, it’s about competence, skill, and merit. And so, the president is focused on ensuring that the most competent individuals, the best and the brightest in this country, are in positions in this federal government, especially when it comes to public safety, I can’t overemphasize the importance of those jobs.”

The message is clear: race, gender, and disability are no longer seen as obstacles to merit; they are antithetical to it. The implication? To make America great – and wealthy again – these “drags” on society must be eliminated. Not through overt violence, but through quiet neglect, bureaucratic indifference, and institutional culling.

Like icy DHS head Kristi Noem’s brain-splattered puppy, these lives are treated not as something to be valued, but as subhuman nuisances to be put down.

The desire to hasten the demise of these Untermenschen might explain why Trump dismantled USAID, leaving millions of pounds of food to rot and be burned in warehouses across the globe. Not satisfied with that death toll, he has appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine crusader with a history of pseudoscientific claims, to lead Health and Human Services. Kennedy has claimed that black people have a stronger immune system than white people (and hence little need for vaccines), and appears willing to test that theory at the potential cost of millions of black lives.

Shades of Benjamin Rush, the slave-owning signer of the Declaration of Independence and so-called father of American psychiatry, who claimed that black people were “immune” to yellow fever and had a “pathological insensitivity” to pain – a sorely convenient fiction for whip-happy slaveowners. Today, echoes of these beliefs persist in medicine, contributing to disproportionately high mortality rates among black Americans, especially black women, whose pain is routinely dismissed as malingering or, in Rush-like fashion, simply unacknowledged. These racial biases, embedded in clinical practice and perception, ultimately – if left uncorrected – result in euthanasia by default.

In the MAGAverse each race’s place is determined by its perceived biological utility – how well its “inherent abilities” serve the interests of the “master race,” provided, of course, they’re allowed to live.

Occasionally, the rhetoric of ethnic cleansing must yield to politics of pragmatism. Trump’s initial plan to deport immigrant farm workers had to be tweaked – not out of anything as cloyingly gauche as empathy –but to ensure that white American farmers are “taken care of” – and any political damage to the regime contained. As TACO Trump recently explained on CNBC, Latinos “do it [farm work] naturally,” and “don’t get a bad back because if they get a bad back, they die” (emphasis mine). In contrast, “people that live in the inner city [black folk] are not doing that work.” So much for “black jobs.”

Trump’s WTF-brand of eugenics concerning immigrant workers and their supposed natural aptitude for backbreaking labor raises several questions. Is the indefatigability of their spines due to “great genes”? Or are those genes a liability because migrant workers die when those putatively unbreakable spines somehow finally break? (Caveat lector: do not expect logical consistency from the addled brain of Donald Trump.) Or do they die because there is no health care safety net to treat injuries that would otherwise be survivable?

Not that it matters. To Trump, if one of these peons dies, his newly revised immigration policies will ensure a swift replacement – perhaps plucked from “Alligator Alcatraz.” “Arbeit macht frei” (work will set you free). Whether Auschwitz or ICE’s concentration camps, death becomes the ticket to freedom.

All of which brings us to that American Eagle ad.

Yes, there’s justification for taking American Eagle’s frivolous ad seriously, especially when it masks an ugly cultural moment behind an attractive blonde countenance. Sometimes jeans aren’t just jeans, particularly when they are punningly conflated with genes. And sometimes blonde actresses aren’t merely blonde actresses, especially in a climate where contemporary far right nationalists, like their historical Nazi counterparts, perceive blondeness and other “Aryan” traits as markers of white supremacy.

It wasn’t all that long ago that white supremacists claimed Taylor Swift as one of their own. Almost a decade ago, Daily Stormer founder Andre Anglin wrote:

“Firstly, Taylor Swift is a pure Aryan goddess, like something out of classical Greek poetry. Athena reborn. That’s the most important thing. It is also an established fact that Taylor Swift is secretly a Nazi and is simply waiting for the time when Donald Trump makes it safe for her to come out and announce her Aryan agenda to the world. Probably, she will be betrothed to Trump’s son, and they will be crowned American royalty.”

Swift publicly rejected any association with white supremacy in a 2019 Rolling Stone interview, calling it “repulsive” and stating, “There’s literally nothing worse than white supremacy. There should be no place for it.”

Still smarting from Swift’s rejection, white supremacists have now chosen Sydney Sweeney as their new Aryan goddess, their Athena redux. Blonde and blue-eyed, Sweeney has become the face of American Eagle’s controversial “great jeans” campaign – a tone-deaf dad joke that flirts uncomfortably with eugenic undertones. In one ad, she says, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring. My jeans are blue,” while the camera lingeringly pans her body.

To some on the far-right, Sweeney’s body embodies the “national flower of white womanhood” as mythologized in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), a film that portrays the Ku Klux Klan as heroic saviors of white womanhood, galvanized by the suicide of a young white woman who leaps to her death to escape a predatory black buck, the era’s equivalent of the rapist menaces Trump invokes with racist, xenophobic relish. It’s a grotesquely ironic inversion of justice in America, where ICE and FBI agents in masks – the new hoods of racist vigilantism – sweep the streets of “rapists” and “vicious criminal thugs,” while actual victims of sexual violence often suffer in silence, sometimes driven to suicide themselves to escape trauma inflicted – not by predatory “illegals” – but by powerful men and their accomplices.

If Anglin’s prediction of Trumpian royalty sounds familiar, you may be thinking of its most recent reiteration by FOX News host Jesse Watters, who believes Sweeney, a Republican, is the right’s new White Hope and will fill the void left by Swift: “You know how this ends? She’s gonna marry Barron. And it’s gonna create the greatest political dynasty in American history.”

Apparently, great minds think alike. Must be in the jeans.

In response to the controversy, MAGA loyalists rushed to defend the ad. Social media has been flooded with images of jean-clad white dad bods – Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) and even an AI-generated Trump – boasting of their “great jeans.” America’s neo-Nazis have voiced their support for both the ad and Sweeney, perhaps hoping she will serve as their new poster girl for white supremacy, regardless of her actual views. If she hopes to avoid that fate, it would be best for her to follow Swift’s lead and publicly disavow their embrace.

Meanwhile, MAGA has accused the “radical left” of canceling American Eagle and Sweeney. White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung has called the backlash “cancel culture run amok,” blaming “warped, moronic, and dense liberal thinking” for the outrage. The usual suspects – Megyn Kelly, Greg Gutfeld, Ted Cruz, Laura Ingraham, Harris Faulkner, and their goosey goosestepping gaggle – have all predictably weighed in.

As The Daily Show’s Desi Lydic aptly put it: “For a story about boobs, it sure has a hell of a lot of assholes.” And for those who may think the story is not about boobs, I refer you to Kelly’s voluminous commentary on Sweeney’s “bosoms.”

Still, these “warped, moronic, dense liberals,” far from running amok, have shown remarkable restraint. Bruce Springsteen has not fired an AR-15 at a pile of blue jeans – unlike Kid Rock who unloaded on Bud Light cans to protest an ad featuring a far more attractive trans influencer (though, presumably, her bosoms were not sufficiently big enough for Kelly). No one has threatened to bomb American Eagle factories – no doubt because they’d have to fly to China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Mexico to do so. And while Rep. Collins slyly implied that the jeans were made in his state, the only thing “American” in American Eagle jeans is the name – and Sweeney. No one has accused Sweeney of not being a woman. And although she and her German Shepherd have faced backlash, no one has threatened their lives; unlike Dylan Mulvaney, Sweeney hasn’t had to go into hiding. And, unlike trans people, blondes –natural or elective – haven’t had their civil rights stripped by executive order or by blondephobic school boards and legislators.

“Sometimes,” Freud is alleged to have said, “a cigar is just a cigar.” But sometimes, a pair of jeans is more than a pair of jeans.

Note

[1] I have chosen not to capitalize “black” until there is substantive reform of American police enforcement and the criminal justice system that results in the criminal prosecution of those who use excessive force and a systemic, long-term reduction in the number of police killings and brutalization of black people.

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