Image: J.S. Billings and Washington Matthews, Ascertaining capacity of cranial cavity by means of water, Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 3: 103-116. 1885. Original image Wikimedia Commons.
Threads of former dark episodes in America’s past are woven through the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS25). The anti-democratic elitism, race theories, and eugenics of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries are subtly, but unmistakably, referenced in the document. The unnecessary presence of these themes in NSS25 reveal much about the Trump Administration’s general program, and the two can’t be separated.
The policies of the Trump Administration, and indeed the attitudes of the President himself, are regularly cast as far-right and extremist, and characterised as chaotic and reactive, and above all, transactional and devoid of a coherent ideology. However, as the NSS25 shows, there is an ideology derived from a now discarded, but at the time popular and respectable, complex collection of pseudo-scientific theories that tied together race and racial hygiene, western civilisation, social classes, and governance. Although the ‘evidence’ on which these views were based has long been jettisoned or invalidated by subsequent scholarship, like ghosts, the conclusions based on them survive to haunt the present.
Phrases consciously and deliberately written into the NSS25 demand greater scrutiny. For example, what does it mean to say, “the character of our nation upon which its power, wealth, and decency were built”? What is “cultural subversion”? Or “the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health, without which long-term security is impossible”? How do these issues relate to “traditional families that raise healthy children”?
How is the aim of “restoring Europe’s civilisational self-confidence and Western identity” to be interpreted? Is there a “Western identity? In what sense will “certain NATO members become majority non-European”? How will America “oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world”, and what form would that opposition take? These objectives seem incongruous in a security document.
More significantly, what is “civilisational erasure” in Europe? Apparently, “[t]he larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence”. How does this collection of supposed deficiencies in Europe find its way into a document like NSS25? What do ‘transnational bodies’ have to do with these ‘issues’?
Under the current Administration, it seems that the Whitehouse library must consist of the works of advocates of scientific racism, Nordicism, and eugenics from over a century ago: like Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1918) and The Conquest of a Continent (1933); Lothrop Stoddard’s The Revolt Against Civilisation (1922), Racial Realities In Europe (1924), and The Rising Tide Of Colour Against White World-Supremacy (1920). Just to name a selection of numerous like-minded and authoritative contemporaries. Although written in a different age and for a different society, the works of these writers use categories, logic, and language not dissimilar to the Trump Administration.
Columbia university palaeontologist and eugenicist Henry Fairfield Osborn, in the preface to 1916 edition of The Great Race, wrote that “race implies heredity and heredity implies all the moral, social and intellectual characteristics and traits which are the springs of politics and government”. In a nutshell, this is the zeitgeist of the apex of scientific racism. A deterministic position that ties racial hierarchy to the quality of governance. It is the Anglo-Saxon branch of the Nordic race, Osborn goes on the declare, that is “again showing itself to be that upon which the nation must chiefly depend for leadership, for courage, for loyalty, for unity and harmony of action, for self-sacrifice and devotion to an ideal”.
Grant wrote in The Great Race that “In the democratic forms of government the operation of universal suffrage tends toward the selection of the average man for public office rather than the man qualified by birth, education and integrity”. Here is the clue to the phrase “character of our nation”. Grant pointed to “the preponderance of the lower types [that] cause a corresponding loss of efficiency in the community as a whole”. Moreover, “[t]he tendency in a democracy is toward a standardisation of type and a diminution of the influence of genius”. An idea inconsistent with the NSS25 objective of “maintaining American economic and technological preeminence”, and consistent with anti-immigration, anti-miscegenation, and eugenics.
The NSS25’s statement that “Throughout history, sovereign nations prohibited uncontrolled migration and granted citizenship only rarely to foreigners, who also had to meet demanding criteria” has clear echoes from a century ago. Stoddard’s Realities’ refrain would be familiar in today’s Whitehouse: “All over the world barriers against wholesale immigration are rising, made necessary by the development of cheap and rapid communication which enables vast masses of population to pour themselves easily into distant lands … [and] … such immigrant floods are a deadly menace not only to their living standards but also to their very national integrity and racial existence”. Or as the NSS25 has it: “The Era of Mass Migration Is Over”.
Trump’s advisers probably would not demur from Stoddard’s observation in The Revolt that “Today, the progress of science may have freed our own civilisation from the peril of armed conquest by barbarian hordes; nevertheless, these peoples still threaten us with the subtler menace of “pacific penetration.”” Or as the NSS25 puts it, “We must protect our country from invasion”.
Grant expounds in The Conquest, “[t]he remedy is first and foremost the absolute suspension of all immigration from all countries … to prevent this impending invasion before it assumes the dimensions of a flood”. Further, he writes, “the European governments took the opportunity to unload upon careless, wealthy and hospitable America the sweepings of their jails and asylums … Our jails, insane asylums and almshouses are filled with this human flotsam and the whole tone of American life, social, moral and political has been lowered and vulgarised by them”. If ‘Europe’ is replaced with the name of various countries of Latin America and Africa, these could be Trump’s words; in effect, the Administration’s statements do echo these sentiments.
There is an unmistakable consonance in these century old texts with the current language on immigration and citizenship. Grant prefigured the Trump Administration by advocating that “aliens who are not citizens, more than a million of whom are said to be illegally here … should be deported as fast as they can be located and funds made available”. Trump would concur with Grant that “[American] citizenship in the past has been made of little value by the absurd way that it has been thrust upon foreigners”. Undoubtedly Grant would have opposed birthright citizenship. These are old American impulses, but current Administration obsessions.
An aim in the NSS25 is to root out “so-called ‘DEI’ and other discriminatory and anti-competitive practices that degrade our institutions and hold us back” – otherwise “[t]he success of radical ideologies that seek to replace competence and merit with favored group status would render America unrecognizable and unable to defend itself.” Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI) wasn’t formulated as a policy back in Grant’s day, but the concept already had its opponents, and opposition was framed in terms of the immutability of heredity (read racial) factors. The Revolt finds Stoddard expressing the fundamental objection: “The idea of “Natural Equality” is one of the most pernicious delusions that has ever afflicted mankind. It is a figment of the human imagination”. The NSS25 seeks the “Re-instilling a culture of competence” by abolishing the notion of equality.
Merit, the alternative to DEI in the Trump world, is revealed in The Revolt as basically racist. For the author not only has it been “conclusively proved that intelligence is predetermined by heredity”, but also that IQ tests “enable us to grade not merely individuals but whole nations and races according to their inborn capacities”. Stoddard points out that “biologists and sociologists have long been coming more and more to regard social and racial status as valid indications of innate quality”, and notes that the then emerging discipline of psychology provides further confirmation of this.
For Grant, “Discussion of these limitations [in innate quality or capacity] is also most offensive to the advocates of the obliteration, under the guise of internationalism, of all existing distinctions based on nationality, language, race, religion and class”. With this quote from Grant we can see the outline of Trump’s hostility towards multinational and multilateral international organisations. The inherent assumption of equality between peoples and nations in multinational cooperation degrades the status of the superior.
Immigration, race, and eugenics are interlinked for Grant, who writes “the true spirit of the modern eugenics movement in relation to patriotism, namely, the conservation and multiplication for our country of the best spiritual, moral, intellectual and physical forces of heredity”. Or as NSS25 has it “The courage, willpower, and patriotism of the American people” is one of America’s “world-leading assets, resources, and advantages”.
Stoddard goes further describing immigration “from the racial standpoint, [as] a form of procreation” and welcoming the “one aspect of immigration restriction in the various countries which does not often receive much attention; namely, the possibility of its use as a method of world-eugenics”. Immigration as “World-eugenics” is “a species of segregation on a large scale, by which inferior stocks can be prevented from both diluting and supplanting good stocks”. This sentiment can illuminate why acting on illegal immigration in Europe will help “Europe to remain European, [and] to regain its civilisational self-confidence”.
That this is the implied solution to the European ‘issue” in particular, is an insight into the NSS25 references to the “the healthy nations of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe” and raising “healthy children”. These references have an eugenicist, racial hygiene taint. A preoccupation shared by Grant and Stoddard as well as numerous of their contemporaries, and by implication the NSS25.
As if to confirm his adherence to the long discredited and noxious pseudo-scientific theories of Grant, Stoddard, Osborn, and their like, Trump went to Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania on 9 December 2025 to reiterate their beliefs. At a rally he confirmed his view of Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” and lamented, “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries?“. The racial scientists and eugenicists from the past would have applauded his call to “have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few. Let us have a few. From Denmark … send us some nice people”. They would have concurred with his statement about “places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime”. Trump is a disciple of Grant and Stoddard.
How has this correspondence between the works of scientific racism and eugenicists of a hundred years ago and a 21st century strategic document come about? Perhaps an impressionable young mind encountered this pseudo-science in the Trump family library. That’s just speculation. Nevertheless, the similarities are pronounced.
For allies, the shock recognition of the underlying threat should be profound, and the NSS25 should be taken seriously and literally. The document includes several statements which may be read as warnings. In particular, referring to “the protection of Core Rights and Liberties” set out on Page 12: “Regarding countries that share, or say they share, these principles, the United States will advocate strongly that they be upheld in letter and spirit. We will oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies.”
The problem is that the words used to describe the ‘Core Rights and Liberties’ are not understood by the authors of NSS25 as having the same sense as a century or more of liberal political thought. Many of the themes and threads throughout the document are not consistent with the liberal democratic principles of inclusion, tolerance, and equality. Quite the opposite, they need to be viewed through the long-standing counter-movement of pseudo-science, racial hierarchies, and eugenics.
As the above explication of possible sources of inspiration for the Trump Administration demonstrates, it is a democracy and a civilisation defined by race hierarchy and rule by elites that is planned for European and other allies. Under this Administration the American world order of Trump is to be imposed through strength and direct interference in “Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies”. The intent of NSS25 is clear. America’s allies should be alarmed.
Copyright Mike Scrafton. This article may be reproduced under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence for non-commercial purposes, and providing that work is not altered, only redistributed, and the original author is credited. Please see the Cross-post and re-use policy for more information.