President Donald Trump appears to have endorsed eugenics during a call in to “The Brian Kilmeade Show” on Friday, telling the Fox News host he believed the country has people in it who are “bad” because “there’s something wrong [with their] genetics.”

“A lot of them were let in here; they shouldn’t have been let in,” Trump said, referring to the perpetrators of a spate of recent attacks, including two men who brought explosives to a far-right protest outside New York City’s mayoral mansion earlier this month.

“Others, they’re just bad, they go bad. Something wrong,” he continued. “There’s something wrong. Their genetics are not exactly… they’re not exactly your genetic. It’s one of those problems, Brian. It’s a terrible thing. And it happens.”

The notion that some groups of people are inherently genetically superior to others rests on widely disproven pseudoscience.

Trump has nevertheless publicly espoused various versions of the theory since his 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. A PBS documentary at the time noted that Trump’s father had instilled in him the idea that their family’s success was genetic.

Trump also alluded to the belief during his 2024 campaign and has complained that he believes immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” which is literally something Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler said.

The most well-known application of eugenics is in Nazi Germany, which “euthanized” at least 70,000 adults and 5,200 children and forcibly sterilized at least 400,000 people on top of its genocide of millions of Jewish people and other minorities, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute.