Republicans and "Normal" Lying: Trans Edition
When did it become standard practice for Republicans not even to care about being called on their lies and hypocrisy? The least worrisome current example of this is the fake outrage on the right after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a statement in which he spoke directly to "Donald," after which the same crowd that loved Trump's snide "Governor Trudeau" cracks shrieked in horror about Trudeau's purported failure to respect a foreign leader.
The problem, of course, is that there are countless examples of much more damaging and dangerous lies that Trump and his entire side of the American political scene repeat endlessly, with a special emphasis on lies about the world's most discrete and insular minorities -- the weaker the minority, the more gleeful the Trumpists' attacks. Sadly, these lies soon become Big Lies, at which point cowardly or calculating Democrats feel forced to make decisions about whether "this is the hill to die on" or instead abandon people who have done nothing to deserve their fates as targets of harassment and worse.
The most recent example of this extreme targeting of a vulnerable group is, of course, Republicans' relentless attacks on transgender people. As Chris Hayes pointed out a month ago, approximately 0.6 percent of Americans are trans, whereas even as far back as March 2022 the Republicans had managed to hype the "threat" of transgenderism to the point where Americans believed that 21 percent of their fellow citizens are trans.
And no wonder. Several months ago, Will Saletan had an excellent podcast segment in which documented the extent to which Trump had vilified transgender Americans. Probably the most surprising moment in the piece was at the 4:36 mark, where he showed a chart documenting Trump's ad buys from late September through late October, broken down by dollars spent on ads covering various topics. The second-highest amount was just a bit more than $10 million of spending to lie about immigration. The highest amount was on transgender issues, with Trump spending ... brace yourselves ... about $28 million in one month on lies about definitely real things like kids getting "sex change" operations in elementary schools. In fact, one has to add together Trump's spending on ads targeting immigration, Social Security, housing, and the economy -- issues #2 through #5 -- to exceed his spending on trans-related lies alone.
And how insane is it that Trump repeated a right-wing lie about federal spending to turn mice transgender during his State of the Union marathon? That was of course utterly false -- and Trump also of course has refused to admit it. But I digress.
In any event, one of the most depressingly predictable results of the 2024 election was that some self-styled moderate Democrats blamed "the left" for Harris's loss, agreeing with Republicans about youth sports and the whole fetid stew of anti-trans lies. Democratic Congressmen Seth Moulton (who was one of the deluded-and-declared presidential candidates in the 2020 primaries) and Thomas Suozzi (who ran unsuccessfully against Kathy Hochul for Governor of New York to stop her nonexistent plan to, in his words, "end single-family housing") both jumped on the blame-it-on-the-trans bandwagon as soon as the election was over.
This "punching left" is now standard fare among far too many people who identify themselves as Democrats. One letter to The Times from a reader in Massachusetts blandly asserted this:
Opposing gender ideology is about protecting the vulnerable and standing up for fairness and justice, values that I have always taken pride in as a liberal Democrat. But the Democratic Party’s current positions on gender go against these values, and the party silences those of us who disagree as bigots. We are horrified that we are trapped in the disaster of a second Trump presidency because our party would not listen to us.
Yes, this self-styled liberal Democrat opposes "gender ideology" and says that Harris lost to Trump because Democrats would not listen to the bullies in their ranks who insist that they are "protecting the vulnerable and standing up for fairness and justice" by lying about trans youth. Again, there have always been people like this (and Moulton and Suozzi) who like to blame every loss on the left, but that does not make it any easier to stomach.
Less expected was California Governor Gavin Newsom's announcement this week that he has now switched sides on the culture-war issue of trans athletes, inviting a right-wing conspiracy theorist onto the governor's new podcast and then agreeing with him that "I think it's an issue of fairness, I completely agree with you on that. It is an issue of fairness. It’s deeply unfair." Mind you, there are approximately 100 such athletes nationwide -- an average of two young people per state -- who are supposedly endangering little girls by participating in school sports; but there was Newsom, triangulating on human rights (while also casually trashing Kamala Harris's campaign more generally).
At best, Newsom's move could be described as a version of the trolley problem, based on the belief that Democrats will never win again if they do not make a show of mowing down a few expendables. Even that, however, makes it seem as if it is mere happenstance that those vulnerable people were tied down to the track onto which he is turning the trolley in the first place. It also presumes that they could not have been freed rather than crushed for Newsom's imagined political advantage. That he thinks he might be President one day is its own laughable idea, but given that he clearly has that idea front-of-mind, this tells us a lot about how little he cares about the truth or defending the defenseless against a mindless mob.
An even more depressing variation on this cynical and callous political calculus goes back to Trump's non-debate with Harris last Fall, when he complained about immigrants receiving taxpayer-funded surgeries in prison, or in his exact words: "Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison." As I explained soon thereafter, that is bonkers; and as I further explained a few days later, the origin story for that lie was outrageous even by Trump's degraded standards. It was especially important to sort that out, because even some people who oppose Trump claimed that in fact he was not wrong about what he said.
How could they say that? Back in 2020, Harris was a declared candidate in the Democratic presidential primaries, and she answered an ACLU candidate questionnaire that included a question about whether "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." As I explained in my followup piece: "At most, she has said that if such an operation were approved in a prison setting, the care for the patient (the 'illegal alien' in prison) should be paid for in exactly the same way that care for a documented alien in prison or a US national in prison would be handled."
And that is still true. Why bring it up again here? In a New York Times op-ed piece shortly after the election, columnist David French was trying to describe low-information voters and differing levels of engagement with campaign news. It was not a bad essay overall, but what caught my eye was this:
A Politico analysis of the Trump campaign’s ads showed that “the single most-aired ad from his campaign since the start of October is all about inflation, Medicare and Social Security — arguing that the vice president will make seniors already struggling with high prices ‘pay more Social Security taxes,’ while unauthorized immigrants receive benefits.”
That is a normal, conventional political message. Trump’s ads attacking Kamala Harris’s past support for taxpayer-funded transition surgery for people in prison and immigration detention were also an appeal to the mainstream, an effort to label her as extreme.
Why was that notable? French describes as "a normal, conventional political message" what is in fact at least two lies: (1) that Harris would have forced people to pay higher Social Security taxes, and (2) that "unauthorized immigrants receive benefits." Worse, he then casually equates what he views as standard political fare with the distortions about transition surgery. What is especially infuriating about this is that the embedded link in French's column under "past support" takes readers to a PolitiFact column that makes it clear that Harris was not at all saying what French (and Trump) asserted. Indeed, she was not even saying something new or abnormal.
Worse still for French, it turns out that what I had laid out in my second column on this topic is in fact the state of the law. As PolitiFact wrote:
The U.S. Supreme Court since the 1970s has ruled that prisons are legally required to provide necessary medical care to inmates, or risk violating the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment against people accused or convicted of crimes. State and federal courts have also ruled in favor of inmates who sued for access to gender-affirming care.
I should say that this was a pleasant surprise, because when I wrote my column, I was simply describing what I took to be the logical and humane implications of the country's core commitments and legal due process. I did not at that point know that the law was already so emphatically on my side. So that counts as a win, I suppose.
That PolitiFact still found a way to call Trump's lies "mostly true" is its own sad story, but the point is that French's own source makes abundantly clear that Harris had simply promised to follow decades of precedent when dealing with imprisoned people -- who are, by definition, powerless at the hands of the state. So how could he call Trump's deceitful and transphobic attacks on Harris "a normal, conventional political message"? Glad I asked.
French is a former Republican who only recently left the party, mostly because he opposes Trump. That is to be applauded, especially because I believed him when he wrote about how completely his life has been turned upside down by leaving his lifelong political home. What that means, however, is that French was perfectly content through all the years of the Republicans’ descent, never once objecting to any of the lies about abortion (opposition to which he has identified as his core commitment) or to decades of Republican voter suppression, or to Senate Republicans' blocking Merrick Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court, and on and on.
Earlier this week, I wrote about how and when I came to realize that Republicans were no longer a normal political party but were instead a win-at-all-costs power cult. One of the examples that I described in that column was the infamous "Willie Horton ad" in support of George H.W. Bush, which was one of the most vile, racist, deceptive political strategies one could imagine. It was based on a tragedy that had happened in Massachusetts under a furlough program that was very much like one that Ronald Reagan had approved when he was the Governor of California, but Bush and the Republicans absolutely excoriated the Democrats with the worst kind of scare tactics.
If a person rose through the ranks of the conservative movement in those years, they had to decide every day whether they were comfortable with that kind of naked racism -- along with other slimy tactics such as attacking Michael Dukakis's patriotism after cooking up a phony controversy about the Pledge of Allegiance, making up nonsense about the Clintons and Al Gore, and all the rest. If that is the kitchen in which one learned how to cook, maybe completely mischaracterizing Harris's unremarkable commitment to follow both federal and state law seems like a square meal.
All of which is to say that the anti-trans freakout in the United States (and, I regret to report, even up here in Canada) is of a piece with what conservatism has become in recent decades. Even a very high-profile person who left the movement for other reasons thinks nothing of this kind of distortion for political advantage. And why should he? A party that has long leaned into tropes of "lazy welfare mothers" and othering the weak and powerless now openly calls its opponents "groomers" and worse. When that becomes normal, nothing is normal.