The New York Times drew the ire of journalists for a headline that some said downplayed the outrageousness of comments former President Donald Trump made in which he suggested that immigrants have “bad genes.”
Trump was discussing President Joe Biden’s immigration policy on The Hugh Hewitt Show Monday when he embarked on a eugenics-tinged rant.
“How about allowing people to come through an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers? Many of them murdered far more than one person,” he said. “And they’re now happily living in the United States. 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.”
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(The figure Trump cited includes data that spans decades, including his administration, the Associated Press reported.)
Trump’s campaign team tried to argue that his comment wasn’t about immigrants, just murderers, but many saw a tie between his words and the rhetoric of avowed white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
The Times’ headline on a story about the comments read, “In remarks about migrants, Donald Trump invoked his long-held fascination with genes and genetics.”
“With the presidential race in its closing weeks, Donald J. Trump’s language has grown increasingly strident on the issue of immigration,” the article’s opening paragraph reads. “But as he continues to demonize undocumented migrants as violent criminals, the former president is also reviving another old habit: invoking his long-held fascination with genes and genetics.”
To many, though, the story’s framing—especially the headline’s wording—failed to capture just how dehumanizing and offensive Trump’s words were.
A former Times reporter, Andrew Revkin, called it “headline lunacy” in a post on X, and tied it to the fact that the massive daily paper ditched its copy desk several years ago.
Mehdi Hasan, a former MSNBC host who founded the news startup Zeteo, in an X post characterized the story as “the sanewashing of Trump.”
The former metropolitan editor of the Chicago Tribune, Marc Jacob, explained in greater detail his gripe with the headline’s accuracy.
“The New York Times headline makes it seem as if Trump has a deep intellectual curiosity about genetics instead of stating the obvious fact that he’s simply a racist,” he wrote in an X post.
As of 5 p.m. on Thursday, the Times appears to have tweaked the headline’s wording after the wave of criticism. It now reads, “Trump’s Remarks on Migrants Illustrate His Obsession With Genes.”
