Donald Trump is trying to make it sound like Kamala Harris is creating transgender people from scratch, like his beloved “late great Hannibal Lecter.”
“Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” said Trump during the debate on Thursday, sounding like your weird estranged grandfather at Christmas dinner.
The line quickly went viral for its truly wild combination of words in successive order.
If we want to give Trump a modicum of the benefit of the doubt, which it’s not really clear he deserves, the Republican nominee may have been referring to a recently uncovered 2019 American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire.
In the survey, Harris was asked if she would use “executive authority to ensure that transgender and non-binary people who rely on the state for medical care – including those in prison and immigration detention – will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care.”
Harris replied, “Yes.”
But Harris, in her support for gender-affirming surgery several years ago, certainly isn’t making that a central part of her platform in 2024.
But fearmongering about trans people and migrants is nothing new for Trump. At a Moms For Liberty conference earlier this month, Trump went on a similar rant when he alleged that public schools will provide surgery to a transgender minor without parental consent. “Think of it; your kid goes to school, and he comes home a few days later with an operation,” Trump said. “The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.” There is no evidence that any schools do such a thing, even with parental permission. However, that didn’t stop Moms For Liberty from thanking Trump for the lie.
But Trump never let the truth get in his way before.
