President Trump appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Tuesday, August 5, 2025, and backpedaled a bit on his aggressive, inhumane, and, some say, racist deportation policies. But in doing so, he revealed he’s as racist as ever, stating he recently learned undocumented farm laborers can’t get “bad backs” or they’ll “die.”
Furthermore, Trump told Squawk Box host Becky Quick, “inner city people” aren’t “doing that work” — inner city being typical code for Black Americans.
Trump said, “We’re sending them back and then they’re schooling, they’re learning, they’re coming in, they’re coming in legally. We have a lot of that going on, but we’re taking care of our farmers. We can’t let our farmers not have anybody. These people, you can’t replace them very easily. People that live in the inner city are not doing that work. They’re just not doing that work. And they’ve tried, we’ve tried, everybody tried. They don’t do it.”
Trump continued, “These people do it naturally — naturally. I said, what happens if they get it to a farmer the other day? What happens if they get a bad back? He said, ‘They don’t get a bad back, sir, because if they get a bad back, they die.’ I said, that’s interesting, isn’t it? In many ways, they’re very, very special people.”
Likely, if they get “bad backs,” they’ll “die” was meant to indicate that migrant farm laborers rely on the money from the work to such an extent that if they are injured, they’re very lives could be threatened. But Trump seemed to think a bad back is a fatal condition for farm workers.
The farm sectors’ ICE raid pushback
The agricultural sector has increasingly pushed back against Donald Trump’s renewed ICE worksite raids and immigration enforcement policies, citing serious concerns about labor shortages and economic disruption.
Leading industry groups—including the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, and the International Fresh Produce Association—publicly condemned the crackdown, warning it would severely disrupt crop harvests, destabilize the agricultural workforce, and strain national food supply chains.
Referring to the undocumented laborer’s “bad backs” comments, Wayne State University historian and eugenics expert, Branden McEuen, said on Bluesky, “Trump saying people of color are naturally suited to farm labor sure sounds a lot like the slaveholders that said slaves were naturally inclined to servitude.”
Meanwhile, SiriusXM radio host Michelangelo Signorile added, “The racism here is on steroids, as Trump tried to make case to MAGA that farmers need exemptions. Says brown people do hard labor ‘naturally’ and don’t get bad back, while also saying they’ve tried to replace them with people ‘in the inner city’ but they can’t get them to do the work.”
Published: Aug 5, 2025 02:05 pm