Trump goes after Harris with anti-trans ads during football games
Story by Jonathan Allen and Allan Smith and Olympia Sonnier and Ben Kamisar (8 Oct 2024)
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 both for national broadcast 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."
Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., who chairs Equality PAC — the political arm of the Congressional Equality Caucus — criticized the Trump campaign for targeting the trans community.
"Every day, members of the LGBTQ community, especially members of the trans community, are demonized and attacked by Donald Trump and his MAGA extremists who seek to paint these patriotic Americans as a group that should be feared," Torres said. "It is gross, but sadly this tactic is just par for the course with his ilk."
Sean Meloy, vice president of political programs at the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, said recent polling, including those battleground state surveys from The New York Times, taken in places these ads are running, has shown that this framing of trans issues does not swing independents or soft-Democrats into the GOP column.
