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."
She further explained that she had backed such efforts in her home state as California's attorney general because "it is important that transgender individuals who rely on the state for care receive the treatment they need."
In 2015, while serving as California's attorney general, she tried to block a trans woman from receiving gender-affirming surgery in prison. Asked about that in 2019, Harris said, “I had clients, and one of them was the California Department of Corrections. It was their policy. When I learned about what they were doing, behind the scenes, I got them to change the policy."
Two Democratic strategists said the issue is a loser for Harris because many voters in both parties do not want their daughters competing against transgender athletes and do not want to pay for gender-affirming surgery for criminals.
"In all the polls, the trans stuff is bleak," said one of the strategists, adding of one of the Trump commercials, "It's a killer ad."
Charlotte Clymer, a trans activist and Democratic strategist, said she didn't believe the issue was on the Harris campaign's radar at all.
“I’ve heard nothing from them about it. The vice president seems completely obsessed with helping working-class families, reinstating Roe, strengthening the economy and preserving our national security. This simply hasn’t come up," Clymer said.
One Trump ally who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity said they felt the ads missed the mark, calling them a “message mismatch” for the moment, pointing to the gains Harris has made against Trump on the economy in recent weeks and emphasizing the need for Trump’s paid advertising in the final weeks to hammer away at her economic platform.
“I do not think [the campaign’s ads] are particularly well done or produced,” this person said. “The ads for the campaign generally have been pretty bad. More importantly, the message is just off. These are ads that they should’ve run in the four weeks after she took over on the ballot. Defining her as someone that is not aligned with your values. But they missed that opportunity."
Murtaugh countered that the campaign is also running ads focused on the economy, saying, "We’re capable of carrying more than one message at a time.”
“This is an ad that generates what we call earned media stories,” Murtaugh said. “This is an ad that generates media coverage on itself. When you run an ad hitting her on inflation and having a lack of an economic plan to fix it, it doesn’t generate the secondary headlines, but that doesn’t mean we’re not running them.”
Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., who chairs Equality PAC — the political arm of the Congressional Equality Caucus — criticized the Trump campaign for targeting the trans community.
"Every day, members of the LGBTQ community, especially members of the trans community, are demonized and attacked by Donald Trump and his MAGA extremists who seek to paint these patriotic Americans as a group that should be feared," Torres said. "It is gross, but sadly this tactic is just par for the course with his ilk."
Sean Meloy, vice president of political programs at the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, said recent polling, including those battleground state surveys from The New York Times, taken in places these ads are running, has shown that this framing of trans issues does not swing independents or soft-Democrats into the GOP column.
“This is a Hail Mary pass to get the most extreme and bigoted people that they think still exist out there and haven’t already come out and voted for Donald Trump,” Meloy said. “It’s disconcerting, it’s disgusting, and it has a negative impact on the LGBTQ community, which I’m sure they’re perfectly fine with. But I don’t think in the end, it’s going to work.”
Meloy said one of the spots angered him when he saw it Tuesday morning.
“The fact that someone running for the highest office in the United States is just carrying out this level of disgusting rhetoric against the people he’s supposed to be the president of … it’s a perfect example of the type of person Donald Trump and Republicans are right now," he said.
Meloy made a point to highlight the increasing number of trans lawmakers over the past eight years who have won seats in state legislatures, while this fall is likely to feature the first congressional victory for a trans lawmaker.
Trump is far from the first Republican to believe attacking Democrats’ on transgender issues could provide a political opening. But these attempts have not always been successful, even in red-state races like the most recent gubernatorial elections in Kansas and Kentucky, or when GOP nonprofits leaned hard on the message on key 2022 midterm races, a year in which Democrats overperformed.
“We’ve stood up against this,” Meloy said. “And we’ve beaten it."
