In my swing state of Pennsylvania, it's common for people to joke about how exhausted they are by all the campaign ads. But this year, the jokes fail to capture the ongoing psychic damage Donald Trump and his allies are inflicting with their lie-laden appeals. While ads for Vice President Kamala Harris are largely soothing promises of middle-class tax cuts, every Trump spot is maximum-volume bile. We're routinely threatened with rape and murder at the hands of roving gangs of dark-skinned immigrants. Or we're subjected to wildly distorted tapes of Harris laughing as if she's a horror movie villain about to torture us in a basement. But what makes me cringe the hardest are the anti-trans ads.
Because all of the Trump ads are vicious garbage, I spent a lot of time pondering why the hatred against trans people stands out. It's the tagline: "Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you." Whoever wrote this no doubt thinks it's a cutesy troll, but what's striking is that it's more blunt than any other ad in its zero-sum mentality. According to these ads, one can either be for trans people or cis people, but it is not possible to be for both. (Never mind that Harris is a cis woman herself.) The not-so-subtle implicit message is that the mere existence of trans people threatens cis people.
To be certain, this is the central message of the Trump campaign, regardless of topic: If any two people are different — whether due to gender, sexual orientation, skin color or background — they must be in a locked battle for dominance, and there can only be one winner. If women gain, men automatically lose. If people immigrate here, it can only be at the expense of........