Trump continues to claim that public schools are performing secret gender surgeries
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Here’s a CNN story from this morning:
Former President Donald Trump continues to repeat his lie that US schools are sending children for gender-affirming surgeries without their parents’ consent — even though his own presidential campaign could not find a single example of this having happened.
Trump debuted the tale in late August. It was debunked by CNN and others in early September. But Trump, whose campaign has spent tens of millions of dollars on late-campaign attack ads related to transgender people, has revived the story in October as Election Day draws near.
Trump made the claim again last week while discussing education policy during a New York City barbershop discussion filmed by Fox News: “No transgender, no operations — you know, they take your kid — there are some places, your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl. Okay? Without parental consent.” He added, “At first, when I was told that was actually happening, I said, you know, it’s an exaggeration. No: it happens. It happens. There are areas where it happens.”
Trump didn’t name these supposed “areas.” But he made the claim once more during his Friday interview with prominent podcast host Joe Rogan: “Who would want to have — there’s so many — the transgender operations: where they’re allowed to take your child when he goes to school and turn him into a male — to a female — without parental consent.”
The CNN story then goes on to quote a bunch of experts on the question of whether this claim is true, which I realize is standard journalistic practice, but which is also unfortunate, since it treats an obviously lunatic claim as something that requires “investigative journalism.”
What’s interesting about this is the complete collapse of gatekeeping standards that it represents. What Trump is saying here is no different from David Icke Lizard People claims, or flat Earth claims, or faked moon landing claims. Pre-Trump, these kinds of things — that is, claims that were obviously delusional on their face — wouldn’t be something a serious candidate for a major party nomination, let alone the party’s actual nominee, could have made and still survived as a viable candidate. The interplay between the party’s and the media’s gatekeeping functions would have precluded it.
Trumpism represents the apotheosis of a kind of post-truth paranoid politics, that have always been present in American culture, but were always largely if not completely marginalized by various elite filtering mechanisms.
That’s all over now.