US President Donald Trump was accused Friday of espousing white supremacist ideology after he blamed the “genetics” of Muslim immigrants who commit crimes like Thursday’s assault on a Michigan synagogue, while calling for their exclusion from the United States.

“Well, it’s been going on for a long time. It’s a disgrace. They’re sick, they’re really demented people,” Trump said during a call-in interview with Fox News Radio host Brian Kilmeade. “They come into the country, they sneak in.”

Trump was responding to a question about recent attacks by people who happen to be Muslims, including Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, who was stabbed to death by a cadet at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia after fatally shooting instructor Lt. Col. Brandon Shah, and Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, who was shot dead by security guards at the Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan after crashing his vehicle into the building.

Neither Jalloh nor Ghazali “snuck” into the country. Both were naturalized US citizens. Jalloh, originally from Sierra Leone, was a former National Guardsman. Ghazali had recently lost two of his brothers and other relatives to an Israeli airstrike in his native Lebanon.

“They’re sick people, and a lot of them were let in here. They shouldn’t have been let in,” Trump told Kilmeade. “Others are just bad. They go bad. Something wrong—there’s something wrong there. The genetics are not exactly, they’re not exactly your genetics.”

Trump has made many racist statements and has occasionally invoked what critics say is the language of eugenics, a debunked pseudoscience embraced by many white supremacists. He has also boasted about his own “much better blood.”

While running for reelection, Trump echoed Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s screed against “poisoning” by an “influx of foreign blood,” declaring during a December 2023 campaign rally in New Hampshire that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country.

“Trump is an old-school eugenicist nativist. He actually is fine with immigrants as long as they have the right ‘genes,’” said David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, in response to Friday’s interview. “This argument was the basis of the creation of the restrictive US immigration system 100 years ago.”

Trump has previously said that he wants more immigrants from countries like Norway and not from what he called “shithole” nations in the Global South. His second administration has effectively ended refugee admissions—with the notable exception of white South Africans, the only people in the world allowed into the United States as refugees since last October, according to US Department of State data.

Progressive journalist Alex Cole said on X: “Imagine being the grandson of immigrants—who dyes his hair, paints his face orange, and wears lifts—lecturing the country about ‘genetics.’ The irony writes itself.”

Trump’s political rise began with his promotion of the racist “birther” conspiracy theory falsely positing that then-President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. He launched his 2016 presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists.”

Once in office, Trump enacted a series of restrictions and outright bans on immigration from nations with Muslim majorities.

“He’s a white supremacist,” journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote Friday on X. “He doesn’t hide it.”

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