Requblican advertising in these late days of the presidential and congressional campaigns is focusing on their policy of persecuting transgender persons.
The Trump campaign has recently dropped at least 17 million on ads highlighting Harris' support during her 2019 presidential campaign for access to gender affirming-medical treatment for transgender people. It's part of a broader Republican strategy casting the Democratic Party as taking transgender rights to extremes. According to data compiled by AdImpact for NPR, these ads have aired more than 30,000 times, including in all seven swing states, and with a particular focus on NFL and college football broadcast audiences.
Here in the battleground state of Wisconsin, the campaigns of Donald Duce Trump, Eric Hovde, and their ilk are desperately trying to tar Kamala Harris and Tammy Baldwin with anything they've ever said or voted for that treated transgender persons as having any humanity at all. Even if they have to lie outright.
(Hovde and his party's Senate Leadership Fund ads also play up, in sinister tones, that Senator Baldwin has a "girlfriend" who works for Wall Street and lives in a swanky New York apartment. The ads all include a black-and-white photo of the woman, just in case you hit the mute button during commercial breaks.)
Republicans are running the same sort of transphobic ads against Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Congressman Colin Allred in Texas, Sen. John Tester in Montana, and Sen. Bob Casey in Pennsylvania. The ads whip up fear and hatred against immigrants and the transgender community, using images of visibly gender-nonconforming people such as Queer Eye's Jonathan Van Ness and drag performer Pattie Gonia, neither of whom consented for their likenesses to be used.
Naturally, some GQP operative dug up the trifecta of an undocumented immigrant who had gender correction surgery while in prison for murder. The Trump ads make it sound as if Kamala Harris personally wheeled her into the operating room.
A Trump ad that began heavy air play this week begins with a ten-second video clip from Charlemagne Tha God's radio show on September 30 apparently calling Harris's position on the transgender issue "nuts," surely calculated to drive in the wedge between Harris and black male voters.
He may have merely complimenting an earlier Trump ad. In any event, if the rights of transgender Americans came up during Harris’s hour-long grilling on Mr. Tha God’s show on Tuesday, I’ve found no mention of it in any news reports.
Harris was asked about transgender surgery for prison inmates at a Fox town hall later that day, and said little more than promising "I will follow the law."
She must have decided that the Trump team had enough material for their transbashing house of terror already.
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