Former President Donald Trump’s campaign is betting millions of dollars that most sports fans don’t want their taxes spent on providing gender-affirming surgeries for prisoners, including undocumented immigrants.
Viewers tuning into NFL and college football games in recent weeks have been bombarded with two Trump ads — running nationally and locally in swing states — that take issue with Vice President Kamala Harris’ past support for taxpayer-funded gender-affirming treatments. They’re running during baseball playoff games, too.
Both ads end with the same punchy tag line: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”
They’re the highest-profile branches of Trump’s long-running argument that Democrats promote transgender rights at the expense of the rest of the public — and his broader case that they are pushing an extreme cultural agenda. Harris’ ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket this summer provided him with a rival who has backed gender-affirming treatments for inmates but has not made that a centerpiece of her campaign for the presidency in 2024.
“It’s the last thing on Earth they want to talk about,” said Chris LaCivita, the senior adviser who oversees Trump’s ads. “So we’ll talk about it for them.”
The Harris campaign declined to comment on the record. Speaking with Fox News last month, Harris campaign communications director Michael Tyler said that an ACLU questionnaire from 2019 in which Harris indicated support for gender-affirming care for prisoners "is not what she is proposing or running on."
Though Trump talks more often inflation and immigration, anti-trans policies have been a core part of his platform since he announced his comeback bid in November 2022.
“We will not let men, as an example, participate in women’s sports,” he said at the time. In a video posted to his campaign’s website last year, Trump promised to push legislation ensuring that Title IX — the common shorthand for laws aimed at providing gender parity in school sports — would not allow trans people to compete in women’s contests.
Trump talks about the issue on the campaign trail, too, often misrepresenting the facts. In Wisconsin in September, he told a story about a supposedly trans boxer who won gold at the Olympics, expressing sympathy for an opponent who was knocked around the ring. But Olympics officials said the boxer in question has always been a woman and fought as a woman.
Trump’s remarks on trans people are consistently among his biggest applause lines at rallies.
The two trans ads are Trump’s two most-seen commercials during professional and college football games, according to AdImpact, a firm that tracks political commercials and ad spending. (AdImpact captures the vast majority, but not all, of ads that air across television.)
Trump campaign officials say the ads will make it harder for Harris to make up ground with men, where polls show her trailing Trump. She has an edge with women.
A Trump campaign official said the campaign's internal polling showed the ad was resonating with Black men — a demographic the campaign is courting. Last week, Charlamagne the God said on "The Breakfast Club" that he saw one of the ads while watching football and called it "effective."
“When you hear the narrator say Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners, that one line I was like, ‘Hell no, I don’t want my taxpayer dollars going to that,’” he said.
On the other hand, recent battleground state surveys conducted by The New York Times and Siena College found that Black voters were the most likely to say that society should accept transgender people as having the gender they identify with.
Tim Murtaugh, a senior Trump campaign adviser, said the ads help highlight a message the Trump team wants to drive about Harris in the final weeks of the campaign: that she is merely “pretending” to not be as liberal as her record shows.
“This is an ad that strikes people when they see it,” he said. “They say, ‘Whoa, there’s no way that someone running for president actually believes that, right?' And then they find out it’s true, and they think, ‘Man, what other crazy things does she believe in? What else is she lying about that’s in her record?’ It’s a gateway to all of the other crazy stuff that she’s always supported.”
When Harris was a candidate for the 2020 Democratic nomination, she filled out a questionnaire for the American Civil Liberties Union in which she affirmed that she would use "executive authority to ensure that transgender and nonbinary 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."
