Just days ago at a rally in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump said: “Your child goes to school and they take your child. It was a he and comes back a she. And they do this. And they do it, and often without parental consent.” It is, of course an absurdist lie, now repeated more times than you might believe. The claim is so non-credible that we should wonder why Trump is employing it. The probable answer lies in the race for US Senate in Ohio.
Long before Trump imagined that American children are given sex-change operations at school, the race between Sherrod Brown and car-salesman Bernie Moreno for the US Senate in Ohio devolved to blaring accusations that “Brown backed allowing children to receive sex change surgery.” This too, of course, is a lie except in the technical sense that some children are born with conditions that require procedures to resolve gonadal ambiguity as part of standard health care, obviously with parental consent.
That libel has been included for months as a part of a threesome of accusations hurled at Brown constantly through attack ads on TV, in mailers, in Facebook ads, and on websites. All of these are funded by a shady super PAC called the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), meaning that Moreno can deny responsibility for them. The SLF advertising almost always contains some version of the same gutter talk. Quoting from the SLF website:
“Brown voted to allow transgender biological men compete in girls’ sports AND introduced a bill letting men into girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms. He also supported allowing sex change surgery…for KIDS!”
In the TV ads, this verbiage is said so quickly that the actual accusations are impossible to discern, and never are the charges elaborated or backed with sources. The point is to give the listener or reader just the vague sense that the avuncular Sherrod Brown is guilty of sexual atrocities, made to sound terrible – he’s allowing “MEN” into “girls’” bathrooms, which, in the real world means ensuring that transgender girls have a restroom they can use. Does Moreno want them to defecate in the school hallways?
The New York Times reports that this ascension of anti-trans campaigning has spread from the Ohio race to other closely-contested races in Montana, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin (and now Michigan). The Times contends this kind of advertising doesn’t work and Republicans are resorting to it out of desperation. I, on the other hand, see the spread of this strategy as premised on the observation that it has worked in Ohio for Mereno.
In recent weeks, Brown’s 5-point lead has been whittled down to 1 or 2 points in the most recent polls, and there’s little to explain that tightening other than the SLF trash-talk ads, which have been ubiquitous. (A polling memo from SLF actually gives Brown a larger lead but it agrees his lead has narrowed.) It looks like Donald Trump saw this success and copied it.
In Ohio, the strategy does come from Moreno’s desperation. Bernie Moreno came to the race loaded with more baggage than a bellhop at the Opprobrium Hotel. In a year when the national Republican strategy centers on bashing immigrants and drug cartels, Moreno is himself an immigrant, from Colombia no less. His father was high in the Colombian government and his brother served as US ambassador from Colombia. Any honest appraisal of the race would peg this as the only reason that Moreno has not led all along. In 2016, Moreno called Trump a “lunatic” and a “maniac.” Being a car salesman has not helped Moreno’s voter appeal, especially after he was fined $400,000 by a court for failing to have paid overtime to his employees. The latter has become a staple of Brown attack ads.
Given that background, Moreno needed a smokescreen, and the child sex-change and girls’ bathroom angles were just the thing to do it.
The Senate Leadership Fund is a creation of Mitch McConnell, with the aim of making that coprolite (fossilized feces) Majority Leader. In addition to its leading role in Ohio, the super PAC has targeted the Senate races in Montana, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, making the anti-trans ads its trademark weapon, after field-testing in Ohio and Montana, the two most vulnerable Democratic seats.
That Moreno never has to personally back the gutter libels is enabled by the fact that Brown and Moreno have never debated, and most likely never will. Moreno has every reason to avoid a debate, number one being that he would be cornered on all of the mendacious accusations being made on his behalf. The absence of a debate has meant that both candidates have avoided any substantive policy discussion, including Moreno’s opposition to any aid to Ukraine, or Brown’s expressed desire to create a Palestinian state.
The big question, of course, is why Ohioans believe such nonsense as that Sherrod Brown wants to change the sex of children or that Haitians in Springfield eat cats and dogs, the lie being spread by Ohio’s other US Senator. Ohio seems to suffer from West Virginia envy and in recent years has sequentially passed Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Texas in redness.
The honest answer to that question rests with the reticence of Ohio Democrats in battling all of the big lies, a phenomenon Ohioans ought to be asking about every day considering so many Ohioans fall for them.
FiveThirtyEight polling average currently gives Brown a 2.4 point lead over Moreno.
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Geoffrey Sea is a historian and writer. He was a 2020 Biden delegate to the Democratic National Convention from Appalachian Ohio and has been known to use cross-gender outhouses.
