Column: Trump’s remarks about school transgender policies are his most unhinged and despicable yet
One of the problems with news coverage of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is that reporters and editors are so numbed by his fire hose of lies that they’re ignoring the depths he’s reaching.
Case in point: Trump’s remarks about transgender students and schools, delivered Friday at an event put on by Moms for Liberty, the far-right gang of book-banners that lately has been searching for relevance.
Prompted to grouse about transgender policy by his host, Moms co-founder Tiffany Justice, Trump said the following:
Children are being taught that they were born in the wrong body. It’s an incredibly abusive message to send.
— Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice cues a Trump diatribe
“Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s gonna happen with your child. And you know, many of these childs [sic] 15 years later say, ‘What the hell happened? Who did this to me?’ They say, ‘Who did this to me?’”
Let’s be brief. None of this exists in the real world. It’s a string of whistle stops in Trump’s fantasyland. He’s painting a picture in which children are essentially kidnapped, held for days so they can be operated on by their school. In which every school has full, unquestioned authority over every child. In which parents have no say. In which the children wake up 15 years later and discover they’ve been changed and don’t remember who did it....
The rule at The Times is that we shouldn’t apply language associated with mental illness to people who aren’t known to be mentally ill. But sorry, who can listen to this and not think, this is abnormal?
California gives sanctuary to kids seeking gender-affirming care and their families. A judge has upheld the law against an attack by a right-wing church.
No one, other than people so addled by transgender-paranoia. People like Tiffany Justice.
Justice had set up Trump’s rant by first quoting Elon Musk’s complaint about his estranged daughter, who has come out as transgender, and then said, “There’s been an explosion in the number of children who identify as transgender and children are being taught that they were born in the wrong body. It’s an incredibly abusive message to send.”
It was like feeding a bad comic a straight line. Trump was off and running.
I don’t sympathize with Moms for Liberty, which discovered in the 2023 elections that its ban-the-book shtick had run out its string.
The group put up or endorsed candidates for school boards across Iowa. Its nine candidates in five school districts all lost, typically scoring 10% of the vote or less. Democrats also fended off the organization’s candidates or wrested control in school board elections in Pennsylvania and Minnesota.
Moms was getting enveloped in a bad odor. It was found to have made common cause with extremist groups such as the Proud Boys, which played a leading role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. An Indiana chapter of Moms for Liberty sent out a newsletter front-paging a quote it attributed to Adolf Hitler. The chapter apologized, but at a subsequent organizational conference, Justice declared, “I stand with that mom.”
Lynn Conway, who died Sunday at 86, was a leader in the development of personal computers and microprocessor technology, and a symbol for generations of transgender individuals.
This is the record that made Donald Trump think he’d find a solicitous audience at the Moms for Liberty summit. He wasn’t wrong. The attendees clapped at his applause lines and laughed at his mugging and jokes, no matter how crass.
What makes this performance, which would render anyone in a normal election cycle unelectable, more demoralizing is the reaction of the press. It was pretty much: Nothing.
As far as I can tell, none of the major newspapers, nor CNN nor MSNBC, quoted his words or even paid them much attention.
The New York Times mentioned that the group’s event featured a panel discussion titled “Moms Know Best: Protecting Kids from Secret Gender Transitions in Schools” and noted that Trump repeated the inaccurate assertion that an Algerian athlete who won an Olympic gold as a female boxer was a man, which has been disproved.
Of the rest of it, not a word.
Nothing that I could find in the Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post and The Times published similar Associated Press dispatches from the Friday event. Neither mentioned the lines about schoolchildren kidnapped and given surgeries against their will.
That’s a shame, because none of the published descriptions of Trump’s appearance give anything like the flavor of his diatribe. They all mentioned Trump’s complaints at the same appearance about transgender athletes supposedly competing as women, but that sounds almost rational (though not quite), compared to what he really had to say.
Elon Musk says he’s relocating his companies to Texas because California laws ‘attack ... families.’ Wait till he learns about Texas laws restricting parents’ rights over their own children.
Trump was building on a neurotic obsession about transgender kids that is alive and writhing in the right-wing and Republican fever swamp.
The idea that children are being subjected by mad scientists to gender experiments and surgery is at the heart of anti-transgender legislation signed by malevolent goons such as Florida Gov. Ron Desantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, abetted by Musk.
Their laws, and those of the 24 other red states that have enacted laws forbidding or constraining gender-affirming care, are typically promoted as “parental rights” laws. In truth, they interfere with the rights of parents who are struggling for access to the best gender-affirming care and treatment for their children.
Trump, however, has outdone them by constructing this despicable fantasy. It can only make things immeasurably harder for the more than 280,000 transgender youths and their families living in states where, according to UCLA’s law school, laws banning access to gender-affirming care, participation in sports, use of bathrooms or “affirmation of gender through pronoun use” have been enacted or proposed.
Within the journalism community, a debate is raging over whether and how the big news organizations should highlight Trump’s mental condition. There’s no secret how to do it, of course: Just quote, directly, what he says, and don’t sugarcoat a thing.
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