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    Trump’s Long Fascination With Genes and Bloodlines Gets New Scrutiny

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    The former president’s remark about undocumented immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country is one of several comments he’s made over the years regarding “good genes.”In 2020, President Donald J. Trump gave a campaign speech in Minnesota railing against refugees and criticizing protests for racial justice. Toward the end, he wrapped up with standard lines from his stump speech and praise for the state’s pioneer lineage.Then, Mr. Trump stopped to address his crowd of Minnesota supporters with an aside seeming to invoke a theory of genetic superiority.“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?” Mr. Trump told the audience. “The racehorse theory, you think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”Mr. Trump’s mention of the racehorse theory — the idea adapted from horse breeding that good bloodlines produce superior offspring — reflected a focus on bloodlines and genetics that Mr. Trump has had for decades, and one that has received renewed attention and scrutiny in his third bid for president.In recent months, Mr. Trump has drawn widespread criticism for asserting that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” a phrase that he said first in a right-wing media interview and has in the last week repeated on the campaign trail.As with the speech in 2020, Mr. Trump’s remarks have been criticized by historians, Jewish groups and liberals, who said his language recalled the ideology of eugenics promulgated by Nazis in Germany and white supremacists in America.In a radio interview on Friday, Mr. Trump again defended his use of the phrase “poisoning the blood.” He dismissed criticism that his language echoed Nazi ideology by saying he was “not a student of Hitler” and that his statement used “blood” in crucially different ways, though he did not elaborate.But much as news articles, biographers and books about his presidency have documented Mr. Trump’s long interest in Adolf Hitler, they have also shown that Mr. Trump has frequently turned to the language of genetics as he discusses the superiority of himself and others.Mr. Trump was talking publicly about his belief that genetics determined a person’s success in life as early as 1988, when he told Oprah Winfrey that a person had “to have the right genes” in order to achieve great fortune.He would connect those views to the racehorse theory in a CNN interview with Larry King in 2007.“You can absolutely be taught things. Absolutely. You can get a lot better,” Mr. Trump told Mr. King. “But there is something. You know, the racehorse theory, there is something to the genes. And I mean, when I say something, I mean a lot.”Three years later, he would tell CNN that he was a “gene believer,” explaining that “when you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with a fast horse” and likening his “gene pool” to that of successful thoroughbreds.Michael D’Antonio, who wrote a biography of Mr. Trump in 2015, has credited this view to Mr. Trump’s father. Mr. D’Antonio told PBS’s “Frontline” in a 2017 documentary that members of the Trump family believed that “there are superior people, and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”In 2019, Mr. D’Antonio told The New York Times that Mr. Trump had said that a person’s genes at birth were a determining factor in their future, more so than anything they learned later.The former president has not just promoted his own “good genes,” but has repeatedly lauded those of British business leaders, Christian evangelical leaders, a top campaign adviser and the American industrialist Henry Ford.A Trump campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, said in a statement that Mr. Trump in his radio interview had “reiterated he is talking about criminals and terrorists who cross the border illegally.” Mr. Cheung added, “Only the media is obsessed with racial genetics and bloodlines, and given safe haven for disgusting and vile anti-Semitic rhetoric to be spewed through their outlets.”Mr. Trump’s political career and rise to the presidency are inextricably linked to anti-immigrant rhetoric, and his tone has only grown more severe in his third run for office.In Friday’s radio interview, the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt asked Mr. Trump to explain his use of the phrase, pressing him multiple times to respond to those who were outraged that the phrase resembled statements made by Hitler in his hate-filled manifesto, “Mein Kampf.”The former president said he had no racist intentions behind the statement. Then, he added, “I know nothing about Hitler. I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works.”Mr. Trump has long had a documented interest in Hitler. A table by his bed once had a copy of Hitler speeches called “My New Order,” a gift from a friend that Ivana Trump, his first wife, said she had seen him occasionally leafing through.He once asked his White House chief of staff why he lacked generals like those who reported to Hitler, calling those military leaders “totally loyal” to the Nazi dictator, according to a book on the Trump presidency by Peter Baker, a New York Times reporter, and Susan Glasser.On another occasion, he told the same aide that “well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” according to Michael C. Bender, a journalist who is now a New York Times reporter, in a 2021 book about Mr. Trump.The former president has denied making both comments. On Friday, he continued his defense by pointing out that his phrase — “poisoning the blood” — differed from passages in “Mein Kampf” in which Hitler uses “poison” and “blood” to lay out his views on how outsiders were ruining Aryan racial purity.“They say that he said something about blood,” Mr. Trump said. “He didn’t say it the way I said it, either. By the way, it’s a very different kind of a statement.” He did not explain the distinction.In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler wrote that great civilizations declined “because the originally creative race died out, as a result of contamination of the blood.” At one point, Hitler links “the poison which has invaded the national body” to an “influx of foreign blood.”Mr. Trump told Mr. Hewitt that he used “poisoning the blood” to refer to the immigrants coming from Asia, Africa and South America — though he did not mention Europeans — who he broadly claimed were coming from prisons and mental institutions. He added that he was “not talking about a specific group,” but rather immigrants from “all over the world” who “don’t speak our language.”Mr. Trump first directly addressed the comparisons between his remark and Hitler’s comments on Tuesday at a campaign event in Iowa, where he told hundreds of supporters that he had “never read ‘Mein Kampf.’”The next day, the Biden campaign posted a graphic to social media that directly compared Mr. Trump to Hitler, using images of them both and listing three quotes from each of them.Mr. Trump has also been accused by historians of echoing the language of fascist dictators, including Hitler. Last month, he described his political opponents as “vermin” that needed to be rooted out.Sheelagh McNeill More

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      Germany’s Far Right Is Nowhere in the Election. But It’s ‘Here to Stay.’

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      In the next national Parliament, the far-right Alternative for Germany party is likely to remain a pariah force. But it looks assured, too, of a role in shaping the country’s future.BERLIN — They promised they would “hunt” the elites. They questioned the need for a Holocaust memorial in Berlin and described Muslim immigrants as “head scarf girls” and “knife men.”Four years ago the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, arrived in the German Parliament like a wrecking ball, the first far-right party to win a place at the heart of Germany’s democracy since World War II. It was a political earthquake in a country that had once seen Hitler’s Nazi party rise from the fringes to win power in free elections.As another election looms on Sunday, the worst fears of many Germans have not come true: Support for the party has dipped. But neither have the hopes that the AfD would disappear from the political scene as suddenly as it appeared. If Germany’s fate in this election will not be settled by the far right, political analysts say, Germany’s future will partly be shaped by it.“The AfD is here to stay,” said Matthias Quent, professor of sociology at Magdeburg University of Applied Sciences and an expert on the far right. “There was the widespread and naïve hope that this was a short-lived protest phenomenon. The reality is that the far right has become entrenched in the German political landscape.”The AfD is polling at roughly 11 percent, just below its 2017 result of 12.6 percent, and is all but guaranteed to retain its presence in Parliament. (Parties with less than 5 percent of the vote do not get any seats.) But with all other parties refusing to include the AfD in talks about forming the next governing coalition, it is effectively barred from power.“The AfD is isolated,” said Uwe Jun, a professor of political science at Trier University.Yet with Germany’s two main parties having slipped well below the 30 percent mark, the AfD remains a disruptive force, one that complicates efforts to build a governing coalition with a majority of votes and parliamentary seats. Tino Chrupalla, one of the AfD’s two lead candidates in the election, believes that, eventually, the firewall other parties have erected against his party will crumble — most likely starting in one of the states in the former Communist East that is currently its power base.Tino Chrupalla, second from right, and other members of the AfD party before a meeting of the Parliament in Berlin last year.Michael Sohn/Associated Press“It’s not sustainable,” he said. “I’m confident that sooner or later there is no way without the AfD,” he told reporters this past week. “It will certainly start on the state level.”Founded eight years ago as nationalist free-market protest party against the Greek bailout and the euro, the AfD has sharply shifted to the right.The party seized on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to welcome over a million migrants to Germany in 2015 and 2016, actively fanning fears of Islamization and migrant crime. Its noisy nationalism and anti-immigrant stance were what first catapulted it into Parliament and instantly turned it into Germany’s main opposition party.But the party has struggled to expand its early gains during the past 18 months, as the pandemic and, more recently, climate change have shot to the top of the list of voters’ concerns — while its core issue of immigration has barely featured in this year’s election campaign.The AfD has tried to jump on the chaos in Afghanistan to fan fears of a new migrant crisis. “Cologne, Kassel or Konstanz can’t cope with more Kabul,” one of the party’s campaign posters asserted. “Save the world? Sure. But Germany first!” another read.At a recent election rally north of Frankfurt, Mr. Chrupalla demanded that lawmakers “abolish” the constitutional right to asylum. He also told the public broadcaster Deutsche Welle that Germany should be prepared to protect its borders, “if need be with armed force.”None of this rhetoric has shifted the race, particularly because voters seem to have more fundamental concerns about the party’s aura of extremism. Some AfD leaders have marched with extremists in the streets, while among the party’s supporters are an eclectic array of conspiracy theorists and neo-Nazi sympathizers.The AfD has not been linked directly to political violence, but its verbal transgressions have contributed to a normalization of violent language and coincided with a series of deadly far-right terrorist attacks.Supporters of the party at a rally in the central German city of Magdeburg this summer.Annegret Hilse/ReutersIn June 2019, a regional politician who had defended Ms. Merkel’s refugee policy was shot dead on his front porch by a well-known neo-Nazi. The killer later told the court that he had attended a high-profile AfD protest a year earlier.Since then, a far-right extremist has attacked a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle during a Yom Kippur service, leaving two dead and only narrowly failing to commit a massacre. Another extremist shot dead 9 mostly young people with immigrant roots in the western city of Hanau.The AfD’s earlier rise in the polls stalled almost instantly after the Hanau attack.“After these three attacks, the wider German public and media realized for the first time that the rhetoric of the AfD leads to real violence,” said Hajo Funke of the Free University in Berlin, who has written extensively about the party and tracks its evolution.“It was a turning point,” he said. “They have come to personify the notion that words lead to deeds.”Shortly after the Hanau attack, Thomas Haldenwang, the chief of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, placed elements of the AfD under surveillance for far-right extremism — even as the party’s lawmakers continued to work in Parliament.“We know from German history that far-right extremism didn’t just destroy human lives, it destroyed democracy,” Mr. Haldenwang warned after announcing his decision in March last year. “Far-right extremism and far-right terrorism are currently the biggest danger for democracy in Germany.”Today, the agency has classified about a third of all AfD members as extremist, including Mr. Chrupalla and Alice Weidel, the party’s other lead candidate. A court is reviewing whether the entire party can soon be placed under formal observation.Alice Weidel, the AfD’s other co-leader, during a media conference in Berlin last month.Clemens Bilan/EPA, via Shutterstock“The AfD is irrelevant in power-political terms,” said Mr. Funke. “But it is dangerous.”Mr. Chrupalla, a decorator who occasionally takes the stage in his overalls, and Ms. Weidel, a suit-wearing former Goldman Sachs analyst and gay mother of two, have sought to counter that impression. As if to hammer home the point, the party’s main election slogan this year is: “Germany — but normal.”A look through the party’s 207-page election program shows what “normal” means: The AfD demands Germany’s exit from the European Union. It calls for the abolition of any mandates to fight the coronavirus. It wants to return to the traditional German definition of citizenship based on blood ancestry. And it is the only party in Parliament that denies man-made climate change, while also calling for investment in coal and a departure from the Paris climate accord.That the AfD’s polling numbers have barely budged for the past 18 months suggests that its supporters are not protest voters but Germans who subscribe to its ideas and ideology.“The AfD has brought out into the open a small but very radical electorate that many thought we don’t have in this country,” said Mr. Quent, the sociologist. “Four years ago people were asking: ‘Where does this come from?’ In reality it was always there. It just needed a trigger.”Mr. Quent and other experts estimate the nationwide ceiling of support for the party at around 14 percent. But in parts of the former Communist East, where the AfD has become a broad-based political force entrenched at the local level, it is often twice that — enough to make it the region’s second-strongest political force.Among the under 60-year olds, Mr. Quent said, it has become No. 1.“It’s only a question of time until AfD is the strongest party in the East,” Mr. Quent said.That is why Mr. Chrupalla, whose constituency is in the eastern state of Saxony, the one state where the AfD already came first in 2017, predicts it will eventually become too big to bypass.“In the East we are a people’s party, we are well-established at the local, city, regional and state level,” Mr. Chrupalla said. “In the East the middle class votes for the AfD. In the West, they vote for the Greens.”Christopher F. Schuetze More

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      GOP Candidate Leticia Remauro Under Fire for Saying ‘Heil Hitler’ at Virus Protest

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyG.O.P. Candidate Under Fire for Saying ‘Heil Hitler’ at Virus ProtestLeticia Remauro, who is running for Staten Island borough president, has apologized for making a “bad analogy.”Credit…Leticia Remauro, via TwitterJan. 12, 2021Updated 6:50 p.m. ETA Republican political operative who is running for Staten Island borough president apologized on Tuesday after she drew widespread condemnation for saying “Heil Hitler” during a protest against coronavirus restrictions.The politician, Leticia Remauro, made the remark as she was recording a video of herself during a protest on Dec. 2 outside Mac’s Public House, a tavern in Staten Island that has become a rallying point against virus restrictions. The video drew attention after it was sent to a reporter with NY1, who shared it on Twitter on Monday night.In the video, Ms. Remauro expresses support for Mac’s and other small businesses.She then pans to a line of officers outside the tavern, saying that she is there to “stand up for our right, the right to pay taxes so that we can pay the salaries of these good men and women, who yes are only doing their job, but not for nothing, sometimes you’ve got to say ‘Heil Hitler,’ not a good idea to send me here, we’re not going to do it.”Ms. Remauro has been involved in Staten Island politics for some 30 years. In 2000, she headed up the campaign of George W. Bush in New York, and her marketing firm was recently employed by the congressional campaign of Nicole Malliotakis, who unseated a Democrat in November with the help of President Trump.The video, which emerged on Monday, drew widespread outrage on social media from politicians and the public, with many people calling for Ms. Remauro to renounce her candidacy for borough president. Some people also called on Ms. Malliotakis to condemn Ms. Remauro’s words.In a post on Twitter on Tuesday, she said her words were a “VERY BAD ANALOGY likening the actions of the de Blasio & Cuomo against small businesses to those of a Nazi dictator.”In an emailed statement on Tuesday, Ms. Remauro said there was “never an appropriate comparison to be made” to Nazi Germany or Hitler.“What I said is not reflective of anything I feel or think about the horrors of the holocaust or the enduring trauma impacting survivors and subsequent generations, or the vital forever necessity of holocaust education,” Ms. Remauro said.Ms. Remauro lists herself on LinkedIn as the president and chief executive of the Von Agency, a marketing and public relations firm. According to data from the Federal Election Commission, Ms. Malliotakis’s congressional campaign paid the Von Agency $90,158.98 for media consulting from 2019 through 2020.Ms. Remauro’s partner at the Von Agency handled advertising on social media for the campaign, according to Ms. Malliotakis’s congressional office. Ms. Remauro also worked for six months on Ms. Malliotakis’s unsuccessful mayoral campaign in 2017.Ms. Malliotakis did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in her own post on Twitter, she condemned Ms. Remauro’s words as “shocking and wrong.”“At a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise across our city and especially on Staten Island, there is no excuse for such words being uttered,” she said.The Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights group, reported a record number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States in 2019, more than in any year since the group began keeping track four decades ago.The emergence of the video came days after a violent mob supporting Mr. Trump broke into the U.S. Capitol, drawing heightened scrutiny of neo-Nazis and other white supremacists who were part of the riot and have supported the president. Photographs from last Wednesday’s riot show a man parading the Confederate flag through the Capitol, and another wearing a black sweatshirt emblazoned with the words “Camp Auschwitz.” Social media posts from Ms. Remauro suggest she was present in Washington last week where people broke into the Capitol building. But she told The New York Post that she had been in her hotel room during the rioting and had not participated.In a tweet in September, Ms. Remauro said that “there will be no peaceful inauguration,” no matter the winner, and blamed Antifa.“This isn’t about getting rid of Trump its about bringing down America,” she said.According to her campaign biography, she served as a community liaison to Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Gov. George E. Pataki, and worked on a diversity program for Goldman Sachs. She has also been the chair of the Staten Island Republican Party.In addition to running for borough president, Ms. Remauro was until recently the chair of the board of the Staten Island Hebrew Public Charter School, according to the school’s website. Jonathan Rosenberg, the president and chief executive of the school, said Ms. Remauro had offered her resignation on Monday night, and the school accepted it.She is also the secretary of the Staten Island Downtown Alliance, a business advocacy group.Ms. Remauro has posted several videos in recent months about the challenges businesses face because of the pandemic. In a video she posted on Facebook in December, she said, “I have no words except I don’t feel like I live in America anymore.”“I feel like we live in some other communist country,” Ms. Remauro said.Azi Paybarah contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      1918 Germany Has a Warning for America

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      HAMBURG, Germany — It may well be that Germans have a special inclination to panic at specters from the past, and I admit that this alarmism annoys me at times. Yet watching President Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign since Election Day, I can’t help but see a parallel to one of the most dreadful episodes from Germany’s history.One hundred years ago, amid the implosions of Imperial Germany, powerful conservatives who led the country into war refused to accept that they had lost. Their denial gave birth to arguably the most potent and disastrous political lie of the 20th century — the Dolchstosslegende, or stab-in-the-back myth.Its core claim was that Imperial Germany never lost World War I. Defeat, its proponents said, was declared but not warranted. It was a conspiracy, a con, a capitulation — a grave betrayal that forever stained the nation. That the claim was palpably false didn’t matter. Among a sizable number of Germans, it stirred resentment, humiliation and anger. And the one figure who knew best how to exploit their frustration was Adolf Hitler.Don’t get me wrong: This is not about comparing Mr. Trump to Hitler, which would be absurd. But the Dolchstosslegende provides a warning. It’s tempting to dismiss Mr. Trump’s irrational claim that the election was “rigged” as a laughable last convulsion of his reign or a cynical bid to heighten the market value for the TV personality he might once again intend to become, especially as he appears to be giving up on his effort to overturn the election result.But that would be a grave error. Instead, the campaign should be seen as what it is: an attempt to elevate “They stole it” to the level of legend, perhaps seeding for the future social polarization and division on a scale America has never seen.In 1918, Germany was staring at defeat. The entry of the United States into the war the year before, and a sequence of successful counterattacks by British and French forces, left German forces demoralized. Navy sailors went on strike. They had no appetite to be butchered in the hopeless yet supposedly holy mission of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the loyal aristocrats who made up the Supreme Army Command.A starving population joined the strikes and demands for a republic grew. On Nov. 9, 1918, Wilhelm abdicated, and two days later the army leaders signed the armistice. It was too much to bear for many: Military officers, monarchists and right-wingers spread the myth that if it had not been for political sabotage by Social Democrats and Jews back home, the army would never have had to give in.The deceit found willing supporters. “Im Felde unbesiegt” — “undefeated on the battlefield” — was the slogan with which returning soldiers were greeted. Newspapers and postcards depicted German soldiers being stabbed in the back by either evil figures carrying the red flag of socialism or grossly caricatured Jews.By the time of the Treaty of Versailles the following year, the myth was already well established. The harsh conditions imposed by the Allies, including painful reparation payments, burnished the sense of betrayal. It was especially incomprehensible that Germany, in just a couple of years, had gone from one of the world’s most respected nations to its biggest loser.The startling aspect about the Dolchstosslegende is this: It did not grow weaker after 1918 but stronger. In the face of humiliation and unable or unwilling to cope with the truth, many Germans embarked on a disastrous self-delusion: The nation had been betrayed, but its honor and greatness could never be lost. And those without a sense of national duty and righteousness — the left and even the elected government of the new republic — could never be legitimate custodians of the country.In this way, the myth was not just the sharp wedge that drove the Weimar Republic apart. It was also at the heart of Nazi propaganda, and instrumental in justifying violence against opponents. The key to Hitler’s success was that, by 1933, a considerable part of the German electorate had put the ideas embodied in the myth — honor, greatness, national pride — above democracy.The Germans were so worn down by the lost war, unemployment and international humiliation that they fell prey to the promises of a “Führer” who cracked down hard on anyone perceived as “traitors,” leftists and Jews above all. The stab-in-the-back myth was central to it all. When Hitler became chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter wrote that “irrepressible pride goes through the millions” who fought so long to “undo the shame of 9 November 1918.”Germany’s first democracy fell. Without a basic consensus built on a shared reality, society split into groups of ardent, uncompromising partisans. And in an atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia, the notion that dissenters were threats to the nation steadily took hold.Alarmingly, that seems to be exactly what is happening in the United States today. According to the Pew Research Center, 89 percent of Trump supporters believe that a Joe Biden presidency would do “lasting harm to the U.S.,” while 90 percent of Biden supporters think the reverse. And while the question of which news media to trust has long split America, now even the largely unmoderated Twitter is regarded as partisan. Since the election, millions of Trump supporters have installed the alternative social media app Parler. Filter bubbles are turning into filter networks.In such a landscape of social fragmentation, Mr. Trump’s baseless accusations about electoral fraud could do serious harm. A staggering 88 percent of Trump voters believe that the election result is illegitimate, according to a YouGov poll. A myth of betrayal and injustice is well underway.It took another war and decades of reappraisal for the Dolchstosslegende to be exposed as a disastrous, fatal fallacy. If it has any worth today, it is in the lessons it can teach other nations. First among them: Beware the beginnings.Jochen Bittner (@JochenBittner) is a co-head of the debate section for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit and a contributing opinion writer.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More