Rachel Maddow warns of ‘profound, dangerous, life-threatening harm’ behind GOP’s anti-trans politics

Rachel Maddow called the Republican campaign against transgender athletes “repulsive,” warning that its dangers extend well beyond Election Day, both for the people it targets and for a country being encouraged to turn against them.

In a Friday appearance on Pablo Torre Finds Out, the MS NOW host challenged the idea that Republican defeats amounted to a decisive rejection of anti-trans politics. Even amid Democratic victories, she noted, voters had approved measures restricting transgender people’s rights.

For LGBTQ+ Americans, her assessment drew a consequential distinction between defeating candidates who campaign on hostility toward a minority and defeating the hostility itself.

“The trans athletes thing, I mean, there’s a lot of actual very serious elements of it,” Maddow told Torre. “And number one is just seeing this national, insistent, now years-long political project to scapegoat and vilify and try to direct violence and hate towards a tiny disfavored minority, which is trans people.”

That is something that has profound, profound impact on some of our fellow Americans.”

Related: Rachel Maddow says Trump killed the Justice Department. Now she wants his attorney general impeached

Republican losses do not erase the harm

Torre raised the issue as a question about electoral strategy. How had opposition to trans athletes, long presented as an advantage for Republicans, failed to deliver victories for candidates campaigning on it?

Politicians had elevated an issue far removed from most Americans’ daily lives into a governing priority, she argued, calling the strategy “a sign of profound political weakness.” But the political tactic’s failures offered little reassurance to the people living with its consequences.

“I think the hard thing and the responsible thing is to keep both of those things in mind, the profound unseriousness of this as a political tactic and the profound dangerous life-threatening harm this is causing to real Americans who are trans Americans,” she said.

When Torre expressed relief that voters had not rewarded the attacks, Maddow pointed to the limits of that conclusion.

“Although when there were trans-related ballot measures on the ballot in multiple states this week in this incredible blue wave election, a lot of them still passed, and not everywhere, but a lot of them did,” she said.

Scapegoating, she argued, damages a society’s ability to recognize obligations to people outside the majority.

When a minority is blamed for economic insecurity, cultural frustration, and opportunities people believe they have been denied, Maddow said, the public learns to redirect those grievances toward its neighbors. The people targeted face the immediate danger, while everyone else is being taught to tolerate it.

“And trying to get us to see some of our fellow citizens as subhuman is trying to get us to erase our own moral core so that we can do horrible things,” she said.

Related: James Talarico tells Rachel Maddow how bigoted, anti-trans politics distract from GOP corruption

When scapegoating becomes government policy

Maddow described the institutional consequences of that politics in a separate, pre-election interview with The Advocate about her new book, Department of Fate, which examines the Justice Department’s history and the uses and abuses of federal power.

Asked about the Trump administration’s treatment of transgender Americans, she argued that the department had reversed its civil rights mission, turning federal authority against people it should protect.

“The Justice Department has completely abandoned the idea that you would pursue the defense of constitutional rights for disfavored minorities and instead is just trying to make itself as much of a weapon for Trump as it possibly can,” Maddow told The Advocate.

The government’s purpose after the midterms, she told The Advocate, should be to protect people and improve their lives. That would require ending the harm caused by “hunting transgender people and hunting immigrants and persecuting the president’s perceived political enemies.”

Getting there, she said, would take sustained pressure through elections, the courts, public protest and the exercise of professional responsibilities.

“When you’re facing a big enemy, you need big resistance, and it means that you need lots of different people pulling in lots of different ways, even though any one of those ways may not seem like it’s going to be consequential enough to do it,” she told The Advocate. “When everybody does that in concert, ultimately that’s the only thing that ever pays off.”

Watch Rachel Maddow and Pablo Torre discuss the election results below.

- YouTube www.youtube.com