In the aftermath of then-GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris on Election Day, a lot has been said and written about what went wrong for her and what went right for him.
One topic that has repeatedly come up is an ad the Trump campaign ran in mid-September, not long after their first and only presidential debate, that focused on Harris’ expressly stated support for taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for inmates, including illegal immigrants, in the California prison system.
During a 2019 interview amid her first failed presidential campaign, Harris said, “Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access” to whatever resources they needed for gender transition surgery if she were elected president.
Her position was also reflected in a 2019 ACLU questionnaire she filled out at the time, where she wrote “As Attorney General, I pushed the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide gender transition surgery to state inmates.”
It’s an issue that was brought up during their September debate, with Trump saying, “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison. This is a radical left liberal that would do this.”
In response, Trump was widely mocked by journalists and Democrat movers and shakers alike on the Twitter/X machine who were incredulous over the claim, believing it not to be true and thinking the statement made him look like a fruitcake.
“Yall serious right now? He says anything. He just put words together that scares people and barely forms sentences,” then-Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) wrote the night of the debate.
“‘She wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens who are in prison’ is the WILDEST thing I’ve ever heard in any debate. EVER,” left-wing political commentator and BET News host Marc Lamont Hill also tweeted at the time.
Except Trump’s claim was spot on, and the ad he ran a week later that included the tagline “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” resonated so much with black and Hispanic voters and suburban female voters that it “stunned some of his aides,” The New York Times reported.
A follow-up ad they ran featuring popular liberal commentator Charlamagne Tha God’s reaction to Harris’ comments on the transgender surgeries “ranked as one of the Trump team’s most effective 30-second spots, according to an analysis by Future Forward, Ms. Harris’s leading super PAC,” the Times also reported.
After everything was said and done, their strategy to emphasize masculinity, coupled with ads that included warnings about Harris’ support for “transgender rights,” ended up paying off big time with the exact voters he needed down at the finish line ― voters Harris was also courting by focusing primarily on so-called abortion rights and woke dogma.
It moved not just male voters from key demographics in his direction but more women voters, too, a two-fer that paid big dividends on Election Day.
To put a finer point on it, the effectiveness of the Trump campaign’s ads despite what leftists on social media were saying about his debate remarks was, is a timely reminder from Trump himself that social media is (thankfully) not real life.
Had the campaign just gone off the reactions of their unhinged critics on social media and panned the idea of running the ads they eventually did on this subject, who knows what would have happened on Election Day?
As it turns out, the people who laughed the most over Trump’s debate comments on the issue aren’t laughing anymore. And in politics, that, of course, is the best kind of revenge of all.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
