Newsmax did Donald Trump a favor in an interview on Friday, providing the president a chance to divert attention from his long-held and often repeated obsession with eugenics. The conversation arose in response to a controversial ad for American Eagle jeans featuring zeitgeisty blonde, white actress Sydney Sweeney.

The provocative ad, an Aryan update to the then 15-year-old Brooke Shields’ infamous 1980 pitch for Calvin Klein Jeans, has the blonde and blue-eyed Euphoria star claiming she has “great jeans,” a play on Trump’s own promotion of “great” genetics.

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“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color,” Sweeney says in the ad as the camera lingers over her body. “My jeans are blue.”

The spot ignited a firestorm of controversy, in no small part because an ad exploiting Sweeney’s sexual appeal was part of a campaign American Eagle said was intended to raise domestic violence awareness. Republicans, including Vice President JD Vance, responded that the “woke” left was overreacting.

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Newsmax host Rob Finnerty jumped through a few tenuously connected hoops to get Trump to his intended “woke” target.

“Your administration has been very open about the fact that American women are not having enough babies,” Finnerty said, reaching for an angle. “There was an ad this week. Sydney Sweeney, an actress, was in an ad for blue jeans. Does America need to see more ads like that? And maybe fewer ads with people like [transgender influencer] Dylan Mulvaney on the cover?”

Trump avoided commenting on the “great jeans” controversy altogether, pivoting immediately to Dylan Mulvaney’s Bud Light sponsorship in a rambling answer about the influencer’s explosive social media partnership with the company in 2023.

“Well, I think the Dylan Mulvaney ad was perhaps the most unsuccessful ad in history,” Trump said, while his fawning interviewer giggled knowingly. “To each his own,” Trump said finally, after repeating himself a few times, and without a shred of irony.

Trump has previously invoked genes and eugenics theory in his past comments.

Eugenics theory, popularized in the late 19th century, holds that undesirable traits can be bred out of humanity, with a tacit understanding among its promoters that (white) Western and Northern European genes are the racial gold standard.

“We’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” Trump said at campaign stop in New Hampshire in 2023 about undocumented “murderers” and other immigrants “invading” the United States from Latin America. In 2020, he expounded for a nearly all-white crowd in Minnesota on his racehorse theory of good breeding.

Trump’s “woke” attack dog Vance wasn’t as circumspect, in a mutually-pleasuring MAGA podcast following the jeans/genes ad release last week. Vance once again invoked “normal” Americans, as he famously did with “normal gays,” to paint everyone else as scowls, out of touch, and slaves to “woke” culture.

“It actually reveals something pretty interesting about the Dems, though, which is that you have like a normal, all-American beautiful girl doing like a normal jeans ad — right, they’re trying to sell jeans to kids in America — and they have managed to so unhinge themselves over this thing. It’s like, ‘Guys, did you learn nothing from the November 2024 election?'”

“Instead, the lesson they have apparently taken is that we’re gonna attack people as Nazis for thinking Sydney Sweeney is beautiful. Great strategy, guys, that’s how you’re gonna win the midterms, especially young American men,” Vance said to a chorus of laughter from the podcast panel.