Back in 2023, conservative pundit and Daily Wire contributor Michael Knowles came right out and said the quiet part out loud, issuing the following proclamation: “Transgenderism must be eradicated.” That comment naturally caused a firestorm of attention, given the way it, you know, implied a genocide of trans people and all. Knowles of course backtracked in response to the wave of outrage and insisted that obviously he couldn’t have been suggesting that existing American trans people needed to be exterminated, but rather eliminated “ontologically,” by convincing the world that “transgender people is not a real ontological category.” Basically, a desire to just logic transfolk right out of existence. This moment effectively ushered in a new era in which this dance between inflammatory, violence-implying statement and “Of course I’m not saying kill people” follow-up became increasingly common. And now this dynamic has apparently worked its way all the way up the right-wing food chain to Donald Trump, considering that he just told a Fox News host that as long as the GOP prevails in the upcoming midterm elections, transgender people will “end.”
What does this mean? What is a statement like this supposed to mean, to any given audience? Surely the host who heard the President of the United States say such a thing immediately jumped in, looking for clarification, right? Well, considering that the network was Fox News, and the host was former U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy, you’re going to be very disappointed. Gowdy didn’t say a word in response to that moment buried in the midst of a classic Trump ramble, simply letting it pass him right on by.
Donald Trump said in an interview yesterday that voters should treat the 2026 midterms as if he is on the ballot, while bringing up how he is going to make “transgender… end.”
www.lgbtqnation.com/…
#transgender #trans #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA
— Transgender World (@transgenderreport.com) 1:01 PM · Sep 1, 2026
As is so often the case with Trump, this is one of those times where the threat in his words is in the implied reverse of unavoidable meaning. Specifically, while talking to Gowdy about the midterms, Trump acknowledged that the President’s party is so often at a disadvantage in those elections. This has been part of a recent strategy in which Trump has been increasingly attempting to assert himself personally into the midterms, in the hopes that it will boost right-wing turnout if people “pretend I’m on the ballot,” while ignoring that he also has historically low approval ratings. He then started telling Gowdy about what would happen if people didn’t pretend he was on the ballot and the unthinkable happened: A very statistically likely blue wave.
If that occurred, Trump promised that “Our country’s going to be in sad shape, because we’re gonna go through a lot of things. You’re going to have the taxes raised, you’re gonna have crazy things happening, like the men in women’s sports will never end. None of this–transgender will never end.”
In response to that, we need only remind ourselves of what words mean. If a GOP failure in the midterms would assure that “transgender will never end,” then a GOP victory in that election must logically mean that “transgender” will “end.” Which is a statement that is both senselessly without meaning, and simultaneously dripping with violent overtones and portent. How does Donald Trump propose we go about this plan of making transgender people “end”? What does a transgender person who has “ended” look like, exactly? Have they been forcibly transitioned to the sex they were assigned at birth, something like that? Or are they just going to be whisked away out of sight, where they won’t offend MAGA eyes? These are, of course, the types of things you would want a TV host to ask the President when he slips a statement like this into his spiel. But Gowdy isn’t being paid to ask questions.
I suppose if the unthinkable process implied here did play out, it would rob the far right of their go-to boogeyman, so they’d have to move to the next rung of the ladder to blame for all of society’s problems. Which is, I dunno … all other LGBTQ individuals? Atheists? Anyone who has ever listened to more than 20 minutes of NPR?
Do I personally think that Donald Trump is promising anti-trans pogroms if Republicans prevail in the midterm elections in November of this year? No, not really. Although there are absolutely groups of his supporters and probably members of his own administration (the Stephen Miller faction) who probably would be giddy at such an idea, I think that at the end of the day, Trump is just desperately casting about for any of the phrases that motivate his most blatantly bigoted base, and any reference to transgender individuals works very well to rile up that group. And because the octogenarian President’s mind is slowly puddling into mush, he can’t think of a way, on the fly, to express that he’s definitely going to make life worse for trans people without implying something so cartoonishly broad as “transgender will end.” At this point, he lacks the descriptive power to even explain any of this shit.
Or perhaps he doesn’t know what to say because he’s really not sure how he’s supposed to make American life any more inhospitable to trans people than he’s already made it. After all, his administration has already gone to war against gender-affirming care, banned trans student athletes en masse, and even stood in the way of constructing something like the Smithsonian’s museum dedicated to American women’s history, simply because a trans person might have appeared within it. In the course of the second Trump administration, the POTUS has leaned on every lever available to him–any many that legally are not supposed to be available to him–to order federal agencies to quit acknowledging the existence of trans people, and even banished trans people of any kind from the American military in an executive order saying no trans person met the criteria of being “honorable, truthful, and disciplined.”
The White House will prioritize the “neutralization” of groups it considers “anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”
— Mother Jones (@motherjones.com) 10:01 AM · May 9, 2026
Lest we forget, because the flood of horrors is a constant thrum all around us: The White House’s own 2026 counterterrorism strategy explicitly identifies “pro-transgender” groups as one of the three types of terrorist cells it is intent on crushing, right alongside “cartels and Islamic terror groups.” When the government says its priority is to root out “radically pro-transgender ideologies” so they can be subject to “neutralization,” then you can hardly blame people for being on edge when the President, in the course of an unrelated interview, casually mentions that Republicans winning the midterm elections will cause transgender people to “end.” One of these days, the “of course I don’t mean exterminated” follow-up is just never going to come.
