#''Well we're not stoning and shooting them! we're nice *reasonable* people! Not like those foreign *Monsters*.''

[shinobicyrus]

In a craven, pathetic, cynical, and transparently desperate ploy to energize his torpid 2024 campaign and match his rival Desantis, Twice-Impeached Ex-President Trump has shuffled out of his Florida tanning tank to join the gibbering chorus of Far-Right trans-panic by releasing a video on Truth Social. The full statement amounts to a hate-ridden, incendiary rant that proposes nationwide federal action that would threaten the health and well-being of trans people, in particular trans children, and will use the law to enforce a rigid, hetero-normative, cisgender social order.

You can watch the full video here on Forbes  if you choose to. I advise against it, personally. The years since his removal from public office and most social media seems to have had atrophied my tolerance. It’s probably why I was somehow shocked at how a video less than four minutes long can cram so much ignorance, falsehoods, hateful invective, and unhinged demagoguery in such a short period of time.

Pages of ink could be spilled breaking down every ranting tangent, from threats to prosecute doctors and hospitals providing gender affirming care, the distasteful novelty of calling trans children mutants,  inventing a conspiracy of pharmaceutical companies selling unsafe hormones and puberty blockers to children, and proposes using the federal government to “promote” aka enforce “positive education of the nuclear family” and the “role of mothers and fathers,” sprinkled with some good old fashioned sex-based bio-essentialism.

The crescendo, the real red meat dripping with bloody doctrine, is at the end:

“I will ask congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States Government are male and female and they are assigned at birth.”

“The Bill will also make clear that Title 9 prohibits men from participating in womens’ sports and we will protect the rights of parents from being forced to allow their minor child to assume a gender which is new and an identity without the parents’ consent. The identity will not be new and it will not be without parental consent.”

“No serious country should be telling its children that they were born with the wrong gender, a concept that was never heard of in all of human history - nobody’s ever heard of this, what’s happening today - it was all when the radical left invented it just a few years ago.”

He ends it all with a chilling conclusion. “Under my leadership, this madness will end.”

I’ve done my best since his departure from office to avoid talking about this sad orange failure puttering around his private golf course while lawsuits and legal investigations pile around him. But I’ve heard little mainstream discussion of this announcement; how Far-Right transphobic rhetoric is being elevated to the level of presidential politics.

While Trump was never friendly to the LGBTQ community, he was also prone to mocking the likes of Pence for his desire of wanting to “hang the gays.” Did his Administration do harm to the queer community? Yes, undeniably so. But to me it felt obligatory, with little energy or drive behind it, as Trump ultimately didn’t care. The callous apathy of an incurious narcissist.

Now, whether he believes the nonsense he’s spewing or not, Trump sees that the Republican base has been driven to a mad fervor over the existence of trans folks. So, like the cynical, amoral opportunist he is, he will regurgitate the vile hateful garbage his speechwriters feed him for political and financial gain.

Whether he gets the nomination or not, this announcement will set the tone for the entire Republican presidential primary of 2024.