Episode 11: The Most Dangerous Thing Donald Trump Believes

Part of Genetic Frontiers Season 2: Genetics in American Politics & Culture, Sue Currell, PhD, discusses the disturbing echoes of eugenic thinking in American politics today.  She calls eugenics “the backbone of political control and a progressive meritocracy,” and argues that “grip of eugenic ideas on American politics today is a political failure to imagine a world where value is not profit.”

Visit geneticfrontiers.org to hear more episodes on the promise, power, and perils of genetic information. 

KEY TOPICS

• Reading of excerpts from  “This May Be the Most Dangerous Thing Donald Trump Believes”: Eugenic Populism and the American Body Politic.

• How should we understand the administration’s agenda to “forge a society that is colorblind, merit-based, and only has two genders” in light of the eugenic history of the United States?

• How are you making sense of this focus on the gender binary, and whether it has a relationship to eugenic ideologies?

• From what you know about the history of efficiency in the United States, how are you thinking about the new Department of Government Efficiency?

• What is the story we're being fed by politicians? And what is the real story?

• How would you describe Trump's relationship to disability rights?

• Can you talk about the complicated histories of eugenics and abortion rights and how you think this is influencing America today?

• How do you think clinicians and scientists should be thinking about the role of science, in particular genetics, in America today?

Read full transcript of this episode here.