President Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress on Tuesday night was a fascist speech. He spent much of the record-setting address — at one hour and 40 minutes, the longest ever delivered to Congress — sneering at and denigrating Democrats, spouting a firehose blast of falsehoods, threatening to annex allied nations like Greenland “one way or another,” calling for the death penalty to anyone who kills a cop, promising to round up “illegal” immigrants, and continuing to roll out the red carpet for his oligarch friend Elon Musk to take over the U.S. government.
But much of the address was also centered on the ongoing moral panic against transgender people — statements that were reportedly not included in excerpts shared with the press ahead of time. Trump used his bully pulpit to tout a range of anti-transgender policies, including executive orders banning “men in women’s sports,” “schools from indoctrinating our children with transgender ideology,” and federal funding for “any institution that engages in the sexual mutilation of our youth.”
Trump also called on Congress “to pass a bill permanently banning and criminalising sex changes on children and forever ending the lie that any child is trapped in the wrong body.”
He added, “Our message for every child in America is that, ‘you are perfect exactly the way God made you.’”
Winking at the anti-transgender crusade, Trump also claimed Musk’s sweeping cuts to the government budget are necessary because of waste like “$8 million for making mice transgender. This is real.” (Fact check: It is not.)
It was disgusting and dangerous scapegoating of a vulnerable group. Transgender people are more likely to be victims of violence and are a statistically minuscule portion of the population that has nevertheless received outsized scrutiny from the mainstream media and especially the Republican Party. While questions regarding gender affirming care for minors and transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports are valid topic of debate, they are certainly not to the extent that mainstream outlets like Fox News and The New York Times have covered them, or a U.S. President for that matter. This is all quite obviously a moral panic. (Probably not coincidentally, Musk has an estranged transgender daughter.)
For a response to Trump’s deranged address, Democrats tapped Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin for a rebuttal. The newly elected U.S. Senator delivered her speech from the Detroit suburb of Wyandotte, where both she and Trump won.
It was easy to see why Slotkin was chosen. Her speech was cool, calm, and collected, and she came off as warm and sincere. She touted her credentials, including growing up in a bipartisan household with a Republican father and a Democrat mother (“we had shared values that were bigger than any one party”), serving in the CIA in Iraq, and working in the White House under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
The 2024 election proves “America wants change,” Slotkin rightly acknowledged.
“But there is a responsible way to make change, and a reckless way,” she said. “And, we can make that change without forgetting who we are as a country, and as a democracy.”
She warned that Trump’s tariffs will cause rising prices and possibly a recession, and services like Social Security and Medicare could be on the chopping block — all to help further enrich Trump’s billionaire friends. She warned of a fascist oligarchy.
“I’ve seen democracies flicker out,” she said. “I’ve seen what life is like when a government is rigged.”
Thankfully, Slotkin’s speech was much shorter than Trump’s meandering rant, but what she didn’t say stood out.
Our democracy is at risk, she said, “when the President pits Americans against each other, when he demonizes those who are different, and tells certain people they shouldn’t be included.”
That was as close as Slotkin got to defending the transgender people that Trump spent so much time in his speech punching down on.
Can you imagine if Trump targeted any other group of people this way?
Among the more reassuring parts of Slotkin’s speech were her three prescriptions for citizens wanting to defend democracy. She encouraged people not to “tune out” and to organize.
And she also welcomed criticism, calling on people to “hold your elected officials, including me, accountable,” adding, “That’s as American as apple pie.”
Here it is, then: If Republicans are going all in on this, Democrats need to do a better job of defending the dignity and respect of transgender people. They should do so unambiguously and say it with their entire chest: transgender people have a right to exist.
