Donald Trump mocks Republicans for giving him a standing ovation for attacking trans people

While most Americans believe the GOP is focusing too much on anti-transgender laws, the issue has become a prime motivator for the Republican base and its most hardcore activists, something for which Donald Trump mocked a crowd of loyal Republican party supporters in a speech this weekend.

Trump rattled off a list of the current conservative bogeymen at the North Carolina Republican Party convention this past Saturday: “critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.” People started cheering hard when he said “transgender insanity,” with many even standing up to applaud him. Trump noticed that too.

Related:

The 2024 election is going to be wildly transphobic

Republicans are already signaling that attacking trans people will be one of their top issues in this election.

“It’s amazing how strongly people feel about that. You see, I’m talking about cutting taxes, people go like that,” Trump said, clapping weakly.

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“I talk about transgender, everyone goes crazy. Who would have thought? Five years ago, you didn’t know what the hell it was!” he said, effectively calling out the Republican base for making up an issue to be mad about.

Trump’s timeline isn’t exactly wrong either. Many states had been allowing transgender students to participate in school sports as their gender for years; California, for example, passed A.B. 1266 in 2013, requiring schools to allow students to use any facilities or participate in school sports teams that correspond to their gender.

But even as recently as 2020, some conservative activists who focused on opposing LGBTQ+ equality couldn’t even get GOP campaigns to pay attention.

For example, in August 2020, Terry Schilling’s small and relatively unknown anti-LGBTQ+ organization American Principles Project was forced to run its own anti-trans ads in several campaigns in an attempt to get the Trump-Pence campaign and the national Republican Party to even think this was an issue worth mentioning.

“What I’m hoping is that once we release these ads and numbers start to move, the Trump campaign will see it’s a powerful issue that the Republican Party can use to its success,” Schilling said just two months before the election that year.

Now, in 2023, Republicans are raging at companies for even putting a rainbow on their website, something corporations have been doing for years.

Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman shared the Trump clip and joked: “TRUMP: Boy, what a bunch of easily manipulated rubes you people are, it’s amazing, even after all this time I still can’t believe how stupid you are.”

“AUDIENCE: Woo hoo! You tell ’em, Trump! Yeah!”