‘A broken clock is right twice a day’: MAGAs melt down over Trump’s 2016 trans rights comments

Trans ally Trump is not what I expected on my 2024 bingo card.

X user MeidasTouch dredged up an old interview Trump had at a 2016 town hall, where the incumbent president said that there have been “very few problems” with trans people using “the bathroom that they feel is appropriate.” He appeared to express support for a trans inclusive bathroom policy, and disagreed with an anti-trans bill that would challenge it saying “leave it the way it is.”

We got trans-friendly Trump before GTA 6? I’ll be damned. As one X user points out, “a broken clock is right twice a day.”

Granted, this was nearly eight years ago. In order to curry favor with an increasingly transphobic voter base, Trump has since made a complete ideological about-face. His 2024 presidential campaign spent $60 million on anti-trans advertising alone, and he recently announced his intention to ban trans troops from military service, reinstating a policy from his first administration that was later repealed by Biden. He has also promised to ban transition related care for minors across the nation, as well as bar trans athletes from competing in sports.

Despite Trump’s subsequent 180° on trans rights, MAGAs are losing their shit about Trump’s past comments.

This user attempts to justify Trump’s statement in some sort of stages-of-grief “denial” response, stating that Trump’s statement was “true when he said it,” but “not true now” in response to “complaints” about trans people using the bathroom. While the user is correct that anti-trans rhetoric has increased, they are wrong about the source of the “complaints.” After the conclusion of Trump’s first term, anti-trans legislation skyrocketed across the nation. In 2021, anti-trans legislation doubled from the previous year, and reached an all time high in 2023. There are currently 668 anti-trans bills working their way through legislative bodies across America. These “complaints” are not being made by everyday people, but are rather a fear-mongering political tactic used by conservative lawmakers in order to stir up antipathy towards trans people and radicalize their base into voting Republican.

Another MAGA user attempted to look on the conservative bright side, describing Trump’s ideological flip flopping as evidence that he is “mentally agile.” The only agility Trump has ever shown is how quickly he manages to distance himself from anyone and anything that challenge his public image.

Some dude named Alex, an apparent expert on trans people, weighed in…

“Trans” does not mean “transexual.” It didn’t back then, it doesn’t now, and doesn’t require a non-existent “gender dysmorphia” diagnosis for a person to self-identify as trans. As for the “predatory men” they reference, there’s no link between trans inclusive bathroom policies and greater risk of assault, a UCLA study finds. There IS however a link between anti-trans legislation and attacks on trans people, and a study by the National Center for Transgender Equality found that over 1 in 10 trans people who have used public bathrooms have been verbally harassed, and 1% of study participants reported that they had been physically and sexually assaulted.

This user hit the nail on the head. Trump doesn’t care about the rights of any human being if guaranteeing those rights stands in the way of power. In Trump’s eyes, trans people are nothing more than a political football that Trump can use in order to score points with his increasingly anti-LGBTQ base, and trans Americans will suffer for it.