Just eight days before the election, Donald Trump’s campaign is running inflammatory ads demonizing transgender people during NFL games aimed at predominantly male audiences.
An ad that aired Sunday features radio host Charlamagne Tha God saying, “Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners.” The ad cuts to Harris discussing her support of health care for transgender prisoners.
“Hell, no, I don’t want my taxpayer dollars going to that,” Charlamagne says. The ad ends with a narrator repeating a tagline frequently heard in the battleground states: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
ADVERTISEMENT
The ads are being strategically placed to air during professional football games in an effort to get men off the sofa and into the polling booth.
At his incendiary rally at Madison Square Garden Sunday evening, Trump appealed directly to those voters and their spouses.
“Get your husband off the couch,” Trump said. “The football game doesn’t mean a d–n thing. You got to get out and vote.”
The Trump campaign and other Republicans have spent tens of millions of dollars airing such attack ads, even as transgender issues remain low on Americans’ list of concerns.
Both Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have incorporated anti-transgender talking points into their rally speeches—regularly emphasizing the need to keep “men” out of women’s sports.
Down-ballot, Republicans are also running a bevy of anti-trans ads in a bid to juice turnout. In Ohio, for instance, an ad targeting vulnerable Sen. Sherrod Brown charges the incumbent Democrat “voted multiple times to allow transgender biological males to participate in girls sports.” the ad also falsely claims that Brown supported “allowing minor children to receive sex change surgeries.”
Every ad that the top GOP super PAC ran for a month against Brown hit on the Democrat’s support of transgender issues, The New York Times reported.
Although Republicans have been running on an anti-trans platform since the 2022 midterms, when they lost many more House seats than they expected, the strategy may do more harm than good. LGBTQ advocates say the ads don’t move voters, but do increase dangerous anti-trans sentiment.
Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, a former high school football coach, has called out the pattern.
“The hate has shifted to the trans community,” he said on a podcast earlier this month. “They see that as an opportunity. If you’re watching any sporting events right now, you see that Donald Trump’s closing arguments are to demonize a group of people for being who they are.”
