DeSantis PAC’s new ad attacks Trump for allowing trans woman to compete in beauty pageant

An organization supporting Florida Ron DeSantis‘s (R) presidential campaign has just released an ad that shows that Donald Trump supported a transgender Canadian model in 2012, implying that Trump – who was the most transphobic president in history – is too trans-friendly to be in the White House.

The video is from Never Back Down, a super PAC supporting DeSantis, and it shows several clips of Trump from 2012. That year, Canadian model Jenna Talackova wanted to compete in Miss Universe Canada, but only “naturally born” women were allowed in. Trump, who owned Miss Universe at the time, was supportive of a rules change to allow Talackova in.

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“TRUMP: LET BIOLOGICAL MEN COMPETE AGAINST WOMEN,” the video says over media clips from 2012. Usually, conservatives are opposed to transgender women competing in women’s sports because they claim that they have an insurmountable biological advantage. It’s unclear what advantage a transgender woman would have in a beauty pageant over cisgender women.

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The ad then shows responses to questions about her genitalia that Talackova was asked in interviews at the time over scary music, while writing quotes from Trump and crossing out his usage of she/her pronouns and replacing them with he/him pronouns to refer to Talackova.

“Why are biological men competing against women now?” Never Back Down captioned the ad on Twitter. “Because Trump sided with the transgender agenda.”

Trump was a pioneer in injecting gender ideology and transgender insanity into our culture. pic.twitter.com/ttTZVWfRqK

— Never Back Down (@NvrBackDown24) July 7, 2023

This is the latest attack on Trump for supposed support of LGBTQ+ equality that ignores his many anti-LGBTQ+ actions in the White House, which include how he opposed the Equality Act, banned transgender people from serving openly in the military, and fought several legal battles in support of religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws.

This past weekend a mailer in Iowa was sent to some Republican caucus-goers thanking Trump for how he “stood up for MARRIAGE EQUALITY and TRANS RIGHTS while many Republican leaders are fighting against gay marriage and trans rights.” The mailer cited Talackova’s participation in the beauty pageant and how Trump invited the Log Cabin Republicans to Mar-a-Lago in 2022.

Earlier this month, a video that DeSantis’s campaign posted – but didn’t produce – to their Twitter account compared DeSantis to Trump on LGBTQ+ issues and criticized Trump for being too supportive of LGBTQ+ people, citing offhand comments he has made in the past decade while ignoring his policy record on LGBTQ+ issues. The video contained images of shirtless buff muscle men inter-spliced with statements about how DeSantis is hurting LGBTQ+ people in his state.

The video was followed by a campaign ad that extolled DeSantis’s attacks on LGBTQ+ equality, playing a sarcastic Pride chant from the New York City Drag March – “We are coming for your children” – with scary music in the background and a narrator taking the chant literally, as if people at Pride in NYC were actually announcing that they were going to sexually abuse children.

The ad showed photos of transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas as well as a photo of a man dressed for puppy play near a small child, an image that has been shared by the far-right online for years and used to attack Pride celebrations. The origin or authenticity of the image is not known.

“When you come after our kids, we fight back,” the narrator said in the voiceover. “Because there’s nothing we won’t do to protect our children.”

According to Semafor, Never Back Down is “an especially crucial player” in the Republican primary that formed before DeSantis even announced his campaign.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say Never Back Down might determine whether or not DeSantis becomes president,” Semafor’s Shelby Talcott wrote. “In addition to its ad spending, it’s expected to play a large role in field operations that are typically handled by campaigns.”