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SYDNEY SWEENEY: President Trump weighs in on her controversial 'Great Jeans' American Eagle denim ad
Posted
August 4, 2025
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42:57
1:23Now PlayingPresident Trump weighed in on the controversial American Eagle ad featuring Sydney Sweeney while speaking with reporters on Sunday evening. A reporter asked Trump how he felt about the reports that Sweeney, an actress well-known for her role in HBO's Euphoria, registered as a Republican in Florida in 2024. He said that if Sweeney is a Republican, he thinks "her ad is fantastic."
American Eagle’s newest marketing campaign was meant to be playful and bold—but it’s now at the center of an online backlash over a single word: "genes."
The campaign, fronted by actor Sydney Sweeney, features the tagline "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans." But a teaser video shared on social media switches the word to "genes," sparking criticism from some viewers who say the messaging—intentional or not—reinforces outdated ideals of beauty and evokes racist undertones.
The backlash has placed the teen clothing brand in the middle of a broader conversation about cultural messaging, historical language, and what kinds of faces brands choose to represent their products.
The criticism centers around a short video where Sweeney says, "Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue." Critics pointed to her blonde hair and blue eyes as symbols of a beauty ideal often associated with whiteness—and said pairing that imagery with talk of genetics felt exclusionary, if not suggestive of eugenicist ideas.
Some viewers saw the ad as celebrating a narrow set of physical traits, with critics arguing that it subtly implied these traits were inherently superior. Others noted the historical use of the phrase "good genes" in the context of eugenics—the discredited theory of improving human populations through selective breeding—which has ties to racist ideologies, including those promoted in Nazi Germany and early 20th-century America.
Not everyone agrees with the criticism. Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News host, tweeted, "I love how the leftist meltdown over the Sydney Sweeney ad has only resulted in a beautiful white blonde girl with blue eyes getting 1000x the exposure for her ‘good genes.’"
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