A version of this news analysis originally appeared in the Inside Politics newsletter, out Fridays. Sign up here to get it first to your inbox.
I watch a lot of football.
Which means I have seen — on a seemingly endless loop — Donald Trump’s new commercials that mock Kamala Harris for supporting in 2019 health care and surgeries for inmates who want to transition to a different gender. That includes migrants in federal detention.
The ads are in heavy rotation in North Carolina and other swing states, and the Trump campaign believes they are the best way to anchor Harris to the more liberal positions she espoused when she ran for president five years ago.
What’s most surprising about the commercials is not the content, but the lack of reaction to the content.
The Harris campaign hasn’t put up a fuss, probably hoping the issue goes away. The media hasn’t written about it much, even though, as of now, it’s the Trump campaign’s closing message.
But when you watch the commercials again, and again, the use of photos of transgender individuals to instill fear becomes extremely noticeable. Inside Politics wondered: Where is the outrage?
First, here is the background.
In 2019, then-Sen. Harris answered a survey from the American Civil Liberties Union about transgender health care. It asked: Would she use her executive authority as president to ensure that inmates — including those in prison and immigration detention — would have access to “comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care?”
She said yes.
Five years later, the Trump campaign pounced. The commercial states that “Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners.”
The ad quotes her discussing her position at a forum.
It then states: “Even the liberal media was shocked Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens.”
One of the Trump ads features the case of convicted murderer Shiloh Quine. As part of a settlement with the state of California in 2015 (when Harris was attorney general there), Quine received taxpayer-funded gender transition surgery.
The commercials also show images of former Energy Department official Sam Brinton, who is non-binary, wearing a red dress. He had been charged in 2023 with stealing someone’s luggage at Reagan airport in Virginia.
There is a photo of Rachel Levine, the first openly transgender person confirmed by the Senate to a federal position. And a photo of Harris next to a drag performer, Pattie Gonia.
Those people aren’t federal prisoners receiving gender-transition health care. The commercials close with the narrator saying Harris is for “they/them” and Trump is for “you.”
From one perspective, the commercials are fair game. The content is basically true, with real survey answers and quotes from Harris to support her. They’re about a real cultural issue — transgender rights — and polls have shown Americans are uncomfortable with policies like transgender women in women’s sports and gender-transitioning health care for minors.
On the flip side, the unrelated photos of the transgender men and women remind me of a more famous commercial that used a photo of a member of a different minority group to instill fear: The 1988 ad “Weekend Passes” that criticized Democrat Michael Dukakis for releasing Willie Horton on a furlough.
The Horton ad was also true. It was about a real issue, crime. But it was the photo of Horton — a menacing-looking Black man that critics widely decried as racist, even in 1988 — that made the ad indelible.
Here’s how the New York Times wrote about it twenty years later.
Indeed, Mr. Bush’s advisers had been focused on Mr. Horton for months. “If I can make Willie Horton a household name, we’ll win the election,” said Lee Atwater, the campaign strategist. He later referred to making Horton “Dukakis’s running mate.” Roger Ailes, another Bush strategist, said, “The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.”
A little more than two years later, when stricken with a cancer that would take his life, Mr. Atwater repented the hardball tactics used in 1988. He said he particularly regretted saying he would make Mr. Horton into Mr. Dukakis’s running mate “because it makes me sound racist, which I am not.”
The story included this comment from a Rutgers professor:
“What crossed the line was not that he was raising the issue of crime itself because crime was a big issue, and that’s fair game,” said David Greenberg, a Rutgers University professor and the author of “Republic of Spin,” about political messaging. “But to use the image of this threatening black man — people call it a dog whistle; it was a pretty clear whistle.”
What’s odd is that it was considered taboo even 36 years ago to incite fear with a photo of a Black man, but in 2024 doing more or less the same with photos of people who are transgender has produced … crickets.
Of course, there are centuries of discrimination against African Americans in this country, from slavery to Jim Crow. But the LGBT community has faced centuries of discrimination as well.
Inside Politics asked the Harris campaign two questions about the commercials.
- Does the vice president still support transgender surgeries for inmates/migrants?
- Does the campaign have a general comment on the commercials? Does it feel they are in-bounds – or are they outside of what is acceptable discourse?
The Harris campaign pointed to an interview campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler did with Fox News a few weeks ago.
“That questionnaire, this is not what she is proposing, it’s not what she is running on,” he said. “You want to talk about immigration and border security — she’s been very clear about how she has governed and how she intends to govern if she is president of the United States.”
Inside Politics asked Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, one of the nation’s leading LGBT organizations, whether she was surprised there hasn’t been more outrage from progressives over the commercials. She declined to answer that specifically, but said, “These attacks lose time and time again.”
“There was not one where they were successful,” Robinson said. “In Ohio, they tried to use it and attach it to the abortion rights ballot and lost. In Virginia, they used these attacks and now we have more LGBTQ representatives than ever before.”
As for the media, there hasn’t been much.
The commercials have been in heavy rotation for about a month, but I can’t find any stories about them in The Washington Post, NPR, PBS, CBS, ABC or The Wall Street Journal.
CNN did a segment on it, and The New York Times and NBC have recently written about them.
To be sure, there’s a lot of mudslinging to cover in Trump world — allegations that Haitian migrants are eating pets, among them.
But this is the Trump campaign’s close.
This issue is what Trump is banking on winning the election.
