Doctor Warns Trump’s ‘Eugenics’ Rhetoric Revives America’s Darkest Past

The nation’s political gridlock has entered its fourth week, but to Dr. Craig Spencer — an emergency physician, professor at Brown University, and survivor of the Ebola epidemic — the danger runs deeper than a shutdown. What he sees in President Donald Trump’s recent comments about “deserving” patients isn’t fiscal policy. It’s ideology — one that carries echoes of one of humanity’s darkest chapters.

“It’s not a stretch to say this administration is touting a eugenics agenda,” Spencer told The Daily Beast. “People don’t want to call it that because it feels unsayable. But it’s real.”

From Public Health to Politics

Spencer, one of America’s leading experts on emergency care, has spent his career confronting crises — pandemics, overcrowded hospitals, and humanitarian disasters. But now, he says, the crisis is political.

As the government shutdown drags on, Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson continue to demand sweeping spending cuts and tighter immigration policies in exchange for reopening federal agencies. Democrats, meanwhile, insist on restoring Affordable Care Act subsidies and reversing recent health care cuts.

To most Americans, it’s a partisan standoff. But to Spencer, it’s a philosophical one — a test of what kind of nation the U.S. wants to be.

“When the government starts talking about who deserves care, who’s worthy of public support,” he said, “that’s when you cross into moral rot. That’s how eugenics started.”

Spencer warns that President Donald Trump and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are pursuing eugenics with their health policies.

The Return of an Old Idea

Spencer’s warning draws from history. In the 1920s and 1930s, American politicians and scientists championed eugenics — the belief that society could “improve” its population by restricting immigration, sterilizing the “unfit,” and privileging those deemed genetically superior.

That same pseudoscience would later inspire Nazi Germany’s racial purity laws.

“The language of this administration — on immigration, on health care, on who deserves the fruits of government — is almost identical,” Spencer said. “It’s just cloaked in different words.”

Under Trump’s leadership, Spencer argues, the government’s tone has shifted from compassion to judgment. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spoken repeatedly about “accountability” in public health spending, a framing Spencer calls dangerous. “It starts with budgets,” he said. “It ends with deciding who lives and who doesn’t.”

Visitors view the statue, which was created based on the measurements of approximately 100,000 American veterans, presented at a eugenics conference at the Museum of Natural History on Aug. 22, 1932, in New York City, NY.

A Doctor’s Perspective

For Spencer, who has worked 18 years in emergency medicine, the moral clarity of his job stands in stark contrast to Washington’s cruelty. “In the ER, I don’t ask about immigration status. I don’t ask about insurance,” he said. “You treat the patient in front of you. That’s medicine. That’s humanity.”

He said no doctor he knows would ever withhold life-saving treatment because someone lacked “the right papers.” Federal law — specifically the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) — still guarantees care to anyone who arrives at an emergency department, regardless of ability to pay.

But Spencer worries that Trump’s messaging could corrode that ethos over time. “Even if the law stands,” he said, “the culture changes. When you tell people that some lives are worth less, they start to believe it.”

Deflection from the White House

Asked directly whether undocumented patients should receive emergency care, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt avoided a clear answer, pivoting instead to immigration talking points. Days later, Speaker Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune reassured the public that Republicans had no plans to amend EMTALA.

“If you’re hemorrhaging and you show up in an emergency room, you get treated,” Johnson said. “That’s very good law.”

Spencer wasn’t reassured. “It’s good law,” he replied, “but what happens when you cut staffing, funding, and supplies? What happens when hospitals close because of those cuts? People still die — just more quietly.”

Dr. Craig Spencer has chosen to speak out about his concerns with the government’s shutdown policy.

The Moral Line

For Spencer, the parallels to history aren’t abstract. As a scholar who lectures on the history of health and eugenics, he recognizes the warning signs — the same rhetoric of “worthiness,” the same obsession with purity and productivity, the same political apathy that allowed it to flourish a century ago.

“I used to hesitate to make the comparison,” he said. “But every day, it becomes harder not to.”

He recalls treating Ebola patients in West Africa and New York City — moments when humanity itself felt fragile, but solidarity triumphed. “In the face of a virus, you don’t ask who deserves oxygen,” he said. “You just act.”

Dr. Craig Spencer, who was diagnosed with Ebola in New York City in 2014, greets some of the nurses who helped him to recovery.

The Stakes

As the shutdown continues, emergency rooms across the country remain open — underfunded, overworked, but defiant. “There’s zero way you can tell me to stop resuscitating someone because they’re undocumented,” Spencer said. “In seconds, I have to decide about airway, meds, surgery — not paperwork.”

His words cut to the heart of the debate: whether America’s institutions will continue to reflect compassion, or calcify into something colder.

“Eugenics isn’t just about genetics,” he said. “It’s about values — deciding who counts as fully human.”

In the end, Spencer’s warning is less about Trump than about us.
“When you start sorting people into those who ‘deserve’ to live and those who don’t,” he said quietly, “you’re not protecting the nation’s future. You’re erasing its soul.”