Washington DC - As President Donald Trump gets increasingly unpopular and faces possible disaster in the midterm elections, the Republicans are doubling down on transphobic attacks.

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump thinks he's found the issue that will help Republicans salvage their midterm election hopes: Transgender rights.

Denouncing transgender athletes is "one of our great soundbites of all time," he recently told a rally. "I like to wait about a week before the election" before raising it, he said, claiming that he was "petrified" the Democrats will suddenly drop their support for trans people.

It was two years ago, locked in a bitter presidential race with Kamala Harris, that Trump's campaign released a devastatingly effective television ad depicting his Democratic opponent as promoting taxpayer-funded sex changes in prisons.

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The narrator famously concluded: "Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you."

Of course, it was abjectly untrue, but many experts credit the ad with helping turn the tide of the 2024 election.

"It was brutal, it was devastating," said Gavin Newsom, California's Democratic governor and an outspoken Trump opponent. "It was a great ad."

Republicans are reigniting the issue, Axios reporting that Elon Musk's "America PAC" has begun an ad blitz attacking Democrats over the trans issue.

"Tired of grown men dunking on female athletes?" the narrator of one ad asks. "James Talarico voted to let biological men play women's sports. Not fair. Not safe. Not Texas."

Talarico voted in 2021 and 2023 against restrictions requiring transgender athletes to compete according to their sex at birth.

The reemergence of the issue frustrates Democratic strategist Bardella. After all, estimates put the number of American adults who identify as transgender at only 1%.

"It's also the height of how idiotic this timeline is that we're allowing an issue that affects such a minute group of people – that is statistically insignificant, frankly – to hijack this amount of the conversation," he said.