Trump Leans In On Anti-Trans Message

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign is betting millions of dollars that most sports fans don’t want their taxes spent on providing gender-affirming surgeries for prisoners, including undocumented immigrants.

Viewers tuning into NFL and college football games in recent weeks have been bombarded with two Trump ads — running nationally and locally in swing states — that take issue with Vice President Kamala Harris’ past support for taxpayer-funded gender-affirming treatments. They’re running during baseball playoff games, too.

Both ads end…   with the same punchy tag line: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”

They’re the highest-profile branches of Trump’s long-running argument that Democrats promote transgender rights at the expense of the rest of the public — and his broader case that they are pushing an extreme cultural agenda. Harris’ ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket this summer provided him with a rival who has backed gender-affirming treatments for inmates but has not made that a centerpiece of her campaign for the presidency in 2024.

“It’s the last thing on Earth they want to talk about,” said Chris LaCivita, the senior adviser who oversees Trump’s ads. “So we’ll talk about it for them.”

The Harris campaign declined to comment on the record. Speaking with Fox News last month, Harris campaign communications director Michael Tyler said that an ACLU questionnaire from 2019 in which Harris indicated support for gender-affirming care for prisoners "is not what she is proposing or running on."