Trump’s Transgender Ad About ‘Misplaced Priorities,’ Campaign Director Says

The political director of the Trump 2024 campaign said the president-elect’s ads focused on the transgender community are more about “misplaced priorities” than trans issues.
On Monday, CNN’s Dana Bash asked James Blair about the two television ads focusing on transgender rights issues. Trump’s campaign and his allies spent tens of millions of dollars on the ads, which aired in battleground states and during NFL and college football games in the leadup to the November 5 election.
“Kamala is for they/them,” one ad says. “Trump is for you.”
“The transgender community in the U.S. is very, very small,” Bash prefaced her questions. “It (the ads) got really outsized attention.”
“There are a lot of people who say that your campaign demonized the trans community as a way to present a wedge issue for, perhaps, men of color, suburban, and parents. Why do you think—and I know you believe that those ads worked—Why do you think they worked?”
Blair replied, “Well, first of all, we didn’t demonize the transgender community. In fact, [it] just really isn’t even about transgender issues. This ad is really about misplaced priorities, and at the end of the day, it is a small minority of the country that thinks taxpayer dollars should be spent on that sort of thing.
“When you have a majority of the country who was saying very clearly that they don’t believe the government is working for them, that they’re worse off than they were four years ago, the country is on the wrong track and then to see a presidential candidate who is saying she’s going to move this agenda forward, and that’s how taxpayer dollars should be spent, it just doesn’t comport with them.”
“They don’t think the government is working for them,” Blair continued. “People want the government to be doing what their priorities are and, frankly, spending taxpayer dollars to give transgender surgery, Aboriginal prisoners is just not a priority of the American people, and that’s why the ad was affected; it’s about misplaced priorities, on behalf of a leader.”
Newsweek reached out to a representative for Trump for further comment.
In September, Michael Tyler, Kamala Harris’ communications director, told Fox News that Harris’ sound bite in the Trump ads “is not what she’s proposing, it’s not what she’s running on.”
Fox News asked Harris whether she stood by her prior position in an October interview, to which she replied, “I will follow the law. And it’s a law that Donald Trump actually followed.”
“I think, frankly, that ad from the Trump campaign is a little bit of like throwing stones when you’re living in a glass house,” she said.
Harris’ performance among LGBTQ+ voters was stronger than that of any Democratic candidate in the last five presidential elections. Although Trump won the 2024 presidential election, he did not do so with any help from the LGBTQ+ community.
According to the NBC News Exit Poll, Harris led Trump 86 percent to 12 percent among LGBTQ+ voters. That’s a 15-point change from 2020 when Trump won 27 percent of the LGBTQ+ vote against President Joe Biden.
LGBTQ+ turnout for Harris was also the strongest of any other Democratic candidate in the last five presidential elections.
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