by Yorgos Mitralias
It must be said that what was unthinkable—and unacceptable—just a few months ago is now becoming commonplace: Trump is a fascist! And he is working to establish a fascist regime! All things considered, we can only rejoice at this now almost unanimous observation and exclaim that… better late than never.
However, few have been quick to understand what this observation means in practice, and even fewer have reoriented their political and other activities accordingly. As a result, Trump’s words and actions have remained “inexplicable,” with the overwhelming majority of the media and “political scientists” declaring themselves unable to unravel the “mystery” of his seemingly incoherent and improvised policies and reveal their deeper meaning and ultimate goal. The result is that virtually everyone, including “experts,” is content to wonder why Trump is taking this or that initiative. For example, when he declares war on science and scientists with a rage and fanaticism unmatched since the days of the Inquisition…
So what is it that makes Trump so hostile to public health, environmental protection, nuclear safety, and above all, anything related to climatology? Why is he dismantling scientific research and laying off scientists en masse? Why is he going so far as to ban keywords such as Antiracist, Biases, Disability, Diversity, Equity, Decarbonization,Gender, Female, Hate speech, historically, inclusion, inequities, minority, segregation, victims, etc., in order to make it impossible to conduct research related to these words, which he himself describes as “far left words”? In short, why is Trump dealing such blows to North American science that it will most likely take several decades for it to return to the level it was at just ten months ago?
The “mystery” of Trump’s all-out war on science seems to have been solved by the former director of the CDC’s (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis (1), who has denounced the eugenics of Trump’s policies, explaining that all of Trump’s actions are guided by his desire to favor the selection of the “fittest” and strongest at the expense of the weakest. That is to say, the poor, the excluded, the sick, the disabled, those who are different, LGBTQ people, transgender people, indigenous people, minorities, and all those with dark skin.
Thus, according to Dr. Daskalakis, the anti-vaccine policy of Trump and his protégé “Health Secretary” Kennedy Jr. (the one who claims to have… a worm eating his brain!) “will bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive and many if not all will suffer “. This seems to be confirmed by the shocking anti-vaccine statement made by Minister Kennedy Jr. (RFK) in the midst of a measles epidemic in Texas, that “ getting the infection is fine, really, because only the strong will survive ”!
We leave it to the most qualified, at Disability Rights Watch, to conclude by reminding us of the monstrous crimes that eugenics policies led to in the not-so-distant past: ” Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, one of the scientists who resigned, raised alarms as he left about RFK’s love of eugenics and frequent discussion of “superior genetics.” Eugenics, a pseudoscientific school of thought tied to white supremacist ideas about genetic and racial “purity” was behind the US’s forced sterilization and anti-anti-miscegenation laws in the early 20th century. In Germany, the Nazi’s took eugenic ideology to it’s extreme conclusions via the mass murder of Jewish people, as well as Roma, disabled people, LGBTQ people, “race traitors” and others they deemed undesirable”.
Of course, the very courageous and insightful Dr. Daskalakis speaks only about his field, what he knows better than anyone else. We would add that eugenic concerns permeate and dominate the vast majority, if not all, of Trump’s measures and policies, far beyond public health and far beyond the United States of America: from the presidential “drill baby drill” policy, which ignores the rapidly worsening climate catastrophe and underpins the ban on all scientific activity related to it, to the dismantling of USAID (United States Agency for International Development), “responsible for distributing humanitarian and development aid abroad, working to reduce poverty.” And from the hunt for migrants and undocumented immigrants by Trump’s armed militias, to drastic cuts in food aid, housing and heating assistance for the poor, in the name of the principle of survival of the fittest, not to mention his active complicity in Israel’s attempt to exterminate Palestinians, who are apparently considered “genetically inferior” beings who do not deserve to live.
Moreover, it is not President Trump who will deny his attachment to an ultra-racist and eugenicist view of the world when he constantly slanders migrants and their children with abominations such as the following: ” Criminals. These are hardcore criminals. We took many people off the streets of Washington, D.C. They’re hardcore. They’re not going to be good. In 10 years, in 20 years, in two years, they’re going to be criminals. They were born to be criminals, frankly. They were born to be criminals, and they’re tough and mean, and they’ll cut your throat and they won’t even think about it the next day. They won’t even remember that they did it”…”You know, I think being a murderer is in their genes. And our country currently has a lot of bad genes.”
But why all these eugenic policies of the Trump administration? What is their ultimate goal and what kind of society are they part of? These questions are not only legitimate but also fundamental to understanding what is happening to us and what lies ahead. In her powerful article “The rise of end times fascism”, co-written with Astra Taylor, Naomi Klein reminds us that Trumpism proposes “a vision of the United States as a bunker in its own right, one in which Ice agents stalk the streets, workplaces and campuses, disappearing those deemed enemies of US policy and interests. ” (2)
So, what could be better for certified racists and supremacists like Trump and his friends than to resort to good old eugenics, which has its roots in North American history. Naomi Klein quotes artificial intelligence researchers Timnit Gebru and Émile P Torres to emphasize that “ though the methods may be new, this “bundle” of ideological fads “are direct descendants of first-wave eugenics”, which also saw a small subset of humanity making decisions about which parts of the whole were worth continuing and which needed to be phased out, cleared out, or terminated “.
And let’s not be too quick to say that this is all political fiction, and that Trump’s eugenics are, for the moment, rather… “soft.” Because we are already living in a nightmarish political fiction since Trump moved back into the White House, and there is no guarantee that his current “soft” eugenics will not give way tomorrow or the day after to a much harsher form of eugenics straight out of the worst misanthropic barbarism of the last century.
Let us therefore conclude this text with these words from Naomi Klein, both as a warning and a call to action: ” To move forward with focus, we must first understand this simple fact: we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants “.
Notes
1. Against Trump the dictator, history does not always repeat itself as farce!: https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/against-trump-the-dictator-history-does-not-always-repeat-itself-as-farce/
2. The rise of end times fascism: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk