Prediction: Trump Will Be All In on Transphobia for 2024 Election

Call it opportunism, call it a social contagion, but the semi-fascist former president will seize on the anti-trans moral panic big time and once he really ramps things up the transphobia will be relentless.

by Assigned

The right wing tabloid-esque Washington Examiner posted an account of a rally Donald Trump held yesterday in Texas, to stump for his preferred candidates in the upcoming midterm elections. We saw this:

Trump seems to still be testing the waters on anti-trans statements. He’s trying out some anti-trans material and seeing how it plays, gauging whether his audience responds to it. It’s nasty and transmisogynist, of course, but by Trump standards the above is fairly mild.

It will get worse.

Analysis is about helping your audience know what to expect, to have a sense of what’s coming in the future. At Assigned, we believe in being up front in what we’re saying, not hinting at it. This means our readers can judge how much faith to put in us by looking through our track record. And so, we’re saying this: We think that Donald Trump, if he runs in 2024, will make transphobia a central part of his speeches and his rhetoric.

Why do we think so? In 2016 and throughout his presidency, Trump was never remotely any kind of LGBTQ+ ally, but he was less vehemently anti-gay and anti-trans than many of his opponents, focusing the worst of his attacks on immigrants and anyone whose ancestry was in Latin America.

Today, the right has a moral panic raging, particularly the Christian right. That obsessive interest in trans people is one we don’t expect any GOP candidate to fight against, much less the former president, who seems to hold no principles.

Trump, at heart, is someone who enjoys cruelty. He loves to show of his version of being clever, which generally means saying the worst thing possible and crowing about how politically incorrect he’s being. Transphobia in general and transmisogyny in particular provides an unending fount of opportunities to be cruel and vicious. We think Trump will drink of this deeply. Transphobia is a natural focus for his bullying instincts, so we expect it will increase as time goes on and he sees his audience responding to it.

Our prediction’s right IF:

Trump’s transphobic remarks increase in cruelty and frequency. He has few major appearances where he doesn’t mention transgender people in some format.

Our prediction’s wrong IF:

Trump continues to stand out for being less transphobic than his primary opponents in the 2024 election. He mentions transgender people occasionally, but not at every appearance. His remarks, while cruel, do not substantially increase in cruelty from the benchmark in our above screenshot.

No contest IF:

Trump dies, or is arrested, or for whatever reason does not run for the presidency in 2024.