Donald Trump’s Racism Mirrors Jeffrey Epstein’s

Clarence Lusane

 March 18, 2026

Jeffrey Epstein was not only a rapist and a child predator, but also — wait for it — a White supremacist. While some speculate that the Epstein issue is just a distraction from President Trump’s virulent and endless racism, others feel that the video the president posted at the beginning of Black History Month of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes was meant to divert attention from the growing Epstein fallout. Well, as it turns out, the two crises are not as far apart as you might imagine.

Bombshell articles in The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and at MS Now pulled the covers off Jeffrey Epstein’s noxious racism. 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 promoted for decades by Donald Trump. Epstein built (or at least tried to build) ties and develop 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 nineteenth 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, D.C., 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 literally 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 Donald Trump. To that end, Epstein sought to connect with the notable race theorists of his day.

Epstein on Race

Perhaps the most notorious book in the modern era advocating a racial basis for intelligence and a social hierarchy that places Whites on top and Blacks at the bottom was The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein, published in 1994. Since then, in multiple books and articles, the research behind that book has been thoroughly debunked and overwhelmingly rejected by scholars in the social and natural sciences. Yet, at the time, many Republicans and some Democrats embraced its racist argument in order to contend that government welfare programs should be cut back. Murray aligned with Republicans in giving testimony to Congress in the 1990s that blamed the morality of poor people for their poverty (as a debate unfolded around the future of welfare programs).

According to the Epstein files, Epstein himself repeatedly tried to correspond with Murray. However, Murray claims he never received (or remembers receiving) any emails from Epstein and did not correspond with him. Regardless, it’s pretty clear that Epstein was writing because of Murray’s notoriety for his work on race and genetics. This was in 2018, more than a decade after The Bell Curve had been published and Murray had become famous for it.

Epstein, according to The Atlantic, was reportedly provided with Murray’s email address by James Watson. He and Francis Crick had, of course, discovered the structure of DNA in 1953. Nine years later, they and Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Around 2000, Watson’s regressive views on race began to surface. That year, he told an audience that “dark-skinned people have stronger libidos,” leaning into a centuries-old racial stereotype. In 2007, according to a former assistant in the London Sunday Times, he said that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”

Epstein also had ties to a number of other researchers and scientists, including Joscha Bach, who received funding from the convicted felon and was hired at MIT’s Media Lab with his help. In one exchange in 2016, Bach wrote to Epstein, stating that African American children “have slower cognitive development” and “are slower at learning high-level concepts.” With the release of those files in January, Bach tried to explain why his statements were not racist and that “scientific discussion about the heritability of traits… [is] very complicated and not my area of research.”

Epstein also spent time on hardcore White supremacist websites. For example, he sent a link to a racist article entitled “Race and IQ: Genes That Predict Racial Intelligence Differences” to left-wing scholar Noam Chomsky. The article came from the outright White supremacist website the Right Stuff, according to The Atlantic. Chomsky, over email, expressed his disagreement with Epstein about race science. According to the Guardian, Chomsky had a “close friendship” with Epstein. There is no evidence that Chomsky participated in or witnessed any of Epstein’s sex crimes, and Valeria Chomsky, his wife, admitted that the couple made “serious errors in judgment” in maintaining ties to him. While the statement vigorously denounced Epstein’s offences, there was, however, no mention of his racist behavior, which few focused on in all those years.

The “Great Gene” President

Epstein’s eugenicist views are in line with the longstanding genetic determinism of Trump. There is no bigger racist science believer than the current occupant in the White House.

For decades, he has bragged about his genetic superiority relative to the rest of humanity. The examples are endless:

“Well, I think I was born with the drive for success because I have a certain gene. I’m a gene believer.”

“You have to have the rights — the right genes.”

“Do we believe the gene thing? I mean I do.”

“I have great genes and all that stuff which I’m a believer in.”

And, of course, in opposition to Trump’s “right genes” are those with the wrong kind. From the president’s perspective that would, of course, include migrants. In an interview discussing them, he opined, “You know, now a murderer — I believe this — it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

Over the years, Trump has also shown little empathy for individuals with disabilities. He famously mocked reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis that affects his joints, by twisting and contorting his body to make fun of him. He also reportedly did not want to be around physically disabled soldiers, according to his former  White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.

Trump often speaks with a strategic ambiguity so that he can later deny that he was disparaging migrants, people with disabilities, or wounded soldiers. He fools no one.

It’s notable that one of Trump’s go-to insults is to call someone “low IQ,” and in nearly every case, his target turns out to be a Black person and disproportionately female ones, including his opponent in election 2024 Kamala Harris and Congressional Representatives Maxine Waters, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Al Green, Jasmine Crockett, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, radio host Charlamagne tha God, and New York Attorney General Letitia James among others.

Trump has been careful, at least publicly, to not explicitly say that Black people are genetically predisposed to criminality. However, he has endlessly attacked Black-led cities as crime zones, without ever labeling White-dominated cities or states the same way. He also posted fake data supposedly demonstrating that African Americans commit crimes at a higher rate (with the clear implication that race is the driving factor).

His eugenicist views are most manifest in his immigration policies and dreams. Theoretically, he is not able to run for president again, so he has little incentive to hide his true feelings. After spending years denying it, in December 2025, he proudly admitted that he had referred to nations in Latin America and Africa as “shithole” countries back in 2018. In a December 9, 2025, speech in Pennsylvania, he plugged for White — and implicitly White only — immigration to this country:

“Remember I said that to the senators that came in, the Democrats. They wanted to be bipartisan. So they came in. And they said, ‘This is totally off the record, nothing mentioned here, we want to be honest,’ because our country was going to hell. And we had a meeting. And I say: Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden – just a few – let us have a few. From Denmark – do you mind sending us a few people?”

In January 2026, Trump essentially halted almost all refugees coming from Africa. The administration stated that it would admit only 7,500 total refugees from around the world in 2026, the lowest number on record. This meant near zero for Black Africans.

At the same time, the Trump administration sought to process 4,500 White South African refugee applications per month starting in January. The president also issued Executive Order 4204 in February 2025 falsely, claiming that Whites in South Africa were being mistreated and deserved an expedited process to become permanent residents of the United States. The new target, contained in a previously unreported document from the State Department dated January 27th and reviewed by Reuters, signals a push to ramp up admissions from South Africa, while refugee applications from other areas have been severely curtailed.

Racial genetics is Trump’s defining worldview (full stop!). That he thinks of Barack and Michelle Obama as less than human should surprise no one who has followed his statements on race over the decades. A compilation of Trump’s views on the former president over all these years boils down to this: Barack Obama is an ape-like radical Muslim (founder of ISIS), and socialist who was not born in the United States but engineered a conspiracy involving thousands to pretend that he was (or maybe he actually was), then fraudulently assumed the presidency and now should be arrested for treason and illegally spying on the Trump White House, and no matter what your eyes and brain tell you, he is not as mentally and physically healthy as I am.

Beginning in the early 1950s, real science, as opposed to the fraudulent versions embraced by Epstein and Trump, was able to make life-changing breakthroughs as a result of access to what became known as HeLa cells. Those cells would be responsible for understanding and creating vaccines and treatment for polio, cancer, HPV, Parkinson’s, measles, HIV, mumps, Zika, and Covid 19, among other diseases. They would lead to the creation of the field of virology. It is highly unlikely (and would likely have been mortifying) that either Epstein knew, or Trump knows, that those cells came from an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks. They were cynically named HeLa, combining the first two letters of her first and last names.

In 1951, when she was admitted to Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, deadly ill with cervical cancer, cell tissues were taken from her body without her or her family’s permission. That unethical theft — legal at the time — would lead to countless billions in profits for pharmaceutical corporations. After the publication of Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in 2010, her story became well known and family-initiated lawsuits proceeded. In 2023, the family reached a settlement with Thermo Fisher Scientific, and, in February 2026, another settlement with Novartis, a Switzerland-based pharmaceutical mammoth.

Trump is easily the most intellectually incurious, ill-informed, unread, vacuous, and petulant president in U.S. history. He will never acknowledge — or even understand — that his rise to power was not due to his having any extraordinary talents, skills, or genetically based genius. It was, without qualification, the result of a lifetime of perpetual race, gender, and class privilege.

Clarence Lusane is an author, activist, scholar, and journalist. He is a Professor and former Chairman of Howard University’s Department of Political Science. He is author of many books. His latest is

Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy.

The End of Childhood

Vuk Bačanović

 March 18, 2026

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Photograph Source: Photo by Rene Bernal

Donald Trump has always struck me as a repulsive figure. Not only because he is a political symptom of the terminal stage of cancer in American society, but also because for years he served as its television billboard. A man who managed to turn banality and arrogance into a full-fledged ideology.

Long before he would transform himself into a messianic figure for the American right, Trump was the creator of one of the most grotesque pedagogies of modern capitalism: the reality show The Apprentice. It was, in essence, a kind of prototype for the Balkan reality spectacles—only with golden elevators and Manhattan skylines in the background. In this spectacle, a group of hapless contestants competed to sell whatever could be sold—from bananas and plastic trinkets to real estate—simply to avoid the moment when His All-Successful Majesty Trump, seated at an enormous table like a corporate sultan, would cut them down with the famous verdict: “You’re fired!”

One of them has remained particularly vivid in my memory—a man wearing a cowboy hat and carrying that dull, sorrowful look of someone who already suspects he is merely a prop in someone else’s performance. With something close to religious devotion, he explained to Trump that he had never read a single book in his life except Trump’s own—How to Get Rich. Or How to Become Rich. Or perhaps How to Become Trump If You Are Not Trump. Something along those lines. The scene was so perfectly grotesque that it could have served as a textbook illustration of the entire cultural model Trump was selling to America—and to the world.

And that, in truth, was the main reason for my disgust. Not because he is rich—capitalism, after all, is full of wealthy people, and some of them even manage to go through life without turning into caricatures of their own offshore accounts—but because for years he preached one of the most morally grotesque pseudo-philosophies the modern world has managed to produce: the idea that the ordinary person need not think too much, nor ask too many questions about the nature of the order in which he lives. It is enough, according to this doctrine, to learn how to step over one’s fellow human beings more efficiently, more quickly, and more ruthlessly; perhaps then, one day, he too might approach the blessed state of living a life resembling that of Mr. Trump.

And, it must be admitted—he succeeded.

A man whose fortune rested largely upon inherited wealth managed, in America’s self-proclaimed age of “debunking all myths,” to sell himself as a kind of urban mythic hero: an anonymous striver who supposedly began his billionaire career by selling newspapers on the street, then—in the finest tradition of American fairy tales—“borrowed” his first million and built an empire from it. This carefully staged persona soon began parading through popular culture: from cameo appearances in Home Alone to guest spots in television series such as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where he was presented as a kind of benevolent, slightly eccentric, but fundamentally likable billionaire.

And in the finale of that series—if you are obedient enough, agile enough, and ruthless enough—you too might win The Apprentice and fulfill your American dream.

But in truth, Trump—and the entire Trumpist dream, even in its Zionist-evangelical interpretative key—is perhaps best summarized by a single line he delivers while once again playing himself in the film The Little Rascals (1994). Appearing as the father of the wealthy boy Waldo, he utters the following sentence:

“You’re the best son money can buy.”

In that one sentence lies the entire catechism of Trumpist civilization. Everything can be bought. Sons and daughters. Friendships. Elections. Morality. Truth.

Only in real life the matter turned out to be somewhat more… practical. Trump’s long-time business associate Jeffrey Epstein, for instance, did not travel the world—particularly through its poorer regions, and quite notably through parts of the Balkans—buying boys and girls so that someone might adopt them as sons and daughters. No. He bought them as sexual slaves. And, as we now know—and this is no longer some fringe “conspiracy theory,” but a matter surrounded by substantial and well-documented suspicion—also for the various satanic rituals of those who had successfully climbed to the top of the pyramid of the Trumpist dream.

And when all of this is placed in a broader context, the picture becomes even clearer. Through his unconditional support for Benjamin Netanyahu—the director of what has become the near-ritual destruction of tens of thousands of children in Gaza—through spectacular geopolitical acts such as the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro, or the notion that an ancient Iranian civilization might be “disciplined” by bombing—once again over the bodies of children—Trump has accomplished something that no American president before him had managed to do so openly.

He has, in the end, stripped bare the myth of the “American Dream.”

That is to say—a nightmare in which the entire world has been drawn into an endless episode of The Apprentice, where billions of people spend their lives in quiet fear of whether the supreme patron of mass murderers, oligarchs, and pedophiles might one day simply “fire” them from existence. And all of this under the comforting illusion that such a system—a grotesque hybrid of television spectacle and moral sewerage—is in fact the pinnacle of civilization and the only proven recipe for happiness.

Yet, paradoxical as it may sound, there is at least one thing for which Trump deserves a certain grim gratitude: his brutal, almost caricatural honesty. Through his sheer arrogance he has torn away the colorful wrapping in which this system had been packaged for decades—wrapped, above all, in the glittering cellophane of Hollywood popular culture.

For America, in no small measure, won the Cold War thanks precisely to that packaging. Sitcoms about harmonious families, perfectly trimmed suburban lawns, kitchens where apple pies were eternally baking, studio audiences that—when not laughing at some well-worn joke—burst into ecstatic cheers whenever a billionaire appeared on screen, sometimes even Trump himself.

And we all watched it.

And we believed.

Now that we have begun to understand that behind those cheerful television curtains there is, more often than not, a Jeffrey Epstein smiling at our children, it may be time to return to somewhat more serious reading. Frantz Fanon—once a frequent visitor to our own betrayed and ultimately shattered civilization called Yugoslavia—wrote the following lines in The Wretched of the Earth:

Supernatural magical forces reveal themselves to be strangely ‘egotistical.’ The strength of the colonized becomes infinitely small because it has been weakened by alien attributes. He no longer has reason to fight them, for power appears to reside in ominous mythical structures. Clearly, everything unfolds as a permanent conflict on a fantastical plane. Yet in the struggle for liberation, sometimes fragmented into unreal sectors, seized by inexpressible fear but also prone to lose itself in hallucinatory fantasies, the people scatter and reorganize themselves again, until through blood and tears they arrive at very concrete and immediate confrontations.

Perhaps, then, the most important lesson of our time is this: once a shattered civilization parts ways with its illusions, it is granted—perhaps for the second time—a chance to rediscover its dignity.

In that sense, this is the end of childhood—and, in our case, the end of a long and rather embarrassing infantilization.

This does not mean that the world will suddenly cease to be imperfect, harsh, and often nightmarish. What it does mean is that we no longer have the luxury of feigned astonishment—the comforting hope that our “civilized world” has merely taken a tragic wrong turn and will soon reset itself to its original settings.

Growing up, as anyone who has truly gone through it knows, is neither simple nor romantic. Least of all now, when we have finally said to Trump—and to his predecessors and successors who have long occupied our imaginations and our loyalties—what perhaps should have been said much earlier:

“You’re fired.”

Vuk Bačanović edits the Montenegro-based political magazine, Žurnal.

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