'It goes deeper than that': New Trump comment said to reveal interest in ethnic cleansing

A recent comment by Donald Trump betrays the former president's interest in the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups, according to a political analyst Wednesday.

In an interview earlier this week, Trump made a comment about "bad genes" in relation to immigration.

“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," Trump said. The ex-president has in the past been known to link his "good genes" to those of an uncle he says was a professor at MIT.

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According to MSNBC political analyst Zeeshan Aleem, This reads as classic Trumpian racist insinuation," but "it goes deeper than that."

"Something even darker comes into view if you take Trump’s increasingly virulent language portraying migrants as subhuman and look at it alongside his emphasis on a historically large deportation policy," Aleem wrote on Wednesday. "Trump is laying the groundwork for what could be conceptualized as a proto-ethnic cleansing project."

Aleem continued:

"He isn’t calling for people to be removed from the country by force based on their ethnicity per se. But his arguments against migrants are predicated on the notion that people from certain ethnic backgrounds are so undesirable that extraordinary resources should be devoted to their expulsion. In the process, Trump is conditioning his entire movement to link what it means to belong in America with race."

Going even further, Aleem argues that "Trump’s rhetoric on migrants has become overtly fascistic and Hitlerian."

"It’s the language of a social Darwinist coming from a guy who has also talked about his subscription to 'racehorse theory,' which The New York Times describes as 'the idea adapted from horse breeding that good bloodlines produce superior offspring,'" the analyst wrote. "And Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, are spreading false stories about Haitian immigrants’ eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, in order to depict them as parasitic savages."

"On top of all this," Aleem adds, "Trump continues to promote the tenets of the 'great replacement' conspiracy theory, which holds that Democrats seek to rig elections and 'replace' Americans with nonwhite immigrants."

"It’s not only false; it’s predicated on the idea that migrants from the Global South are inherently predisposed to oppose or subvert the interests of its true, predominantly white citizens," Aleem noted.

In conclusion, the analyst notes that the comparison isn't a direct one, yet it still gives rise to some concern.

"Trump’s agenda doesn’t match the definition of ethnic cleansing, since the formal basis of deportation would be based on legal status, not ethnic background. But it matters that Trump’s portrayal of migrants from the Global South as an existentially threatening infestation serves as his public rationale for his deportation regime."

Read it here.