You saw the ad. Everyone saw the ad. If you watched an NFL game in October 2024, you could not escape it.
"Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you."
Ten words. Two of them pronouns, weaponized. The message was simple and it was everywhere: there is a "they," and that "they" is coming for what's yours, and only one man stands between you and them.
Here's the thing about that ad. It wasn't wrong about there being a "they." It was just lying about who "they" was.
Eighteen months later, we have the receipts. So let's go through them. All of them.
Act One: The Fear Was the Product
This wasn't a side hustle. It was the centerpiece of the most expensive election in American history.
The Trump campaign spent more than $19 million on just two anti-trans television ads in the first half of October 2024 alone. Those two ads aired roughly 55,000 times, blanketing battleground states and running during NFL and college football games, the most expensive airtime money can buy. Add the super PACs and the Senate races, and Republicans poured more than $65 million into television ads targeting transgender people in competitive states from August onward, according to AdImpact data analyzed by The New York Times.
In the final stretch it got even more concentrated. From October 7 to October 20, Trump's campaign and aligned groups spent an estimated $95 million on advertising, and more than 41 percent of those ads were anti-trans. By multiple analyses, attacking trans people consumed roughly a third of the campaign's entire TV budget. More than the economy. More than the border. More than crime.
Stop and sit with that. Transgender people are less than one percent of the American population. Polls at the time showed trans issues ranked near the bottom of voter concerns. And yet a presidential campaign made a tiny, vulnerable minority its single largest advertising investment.
You don't spend that kind of money attacking one percent of the population because they're a threat. You spend it because they're useful. Fear is a misdirection tool, and misdirection only matters if there's something you need people not to look at.
So what happened after they won? Both halves of the story unfolded at once. Watch.
Act Two: The Ledger
Here is what has been stripped from transgender Americans since January 20, 2025. Not rhetoric. Policy. Signed, ordered, enforced.
Day one: erased on paper. Within hours of taking office, the president signed Executive Order 14168, which redefines "sex" across the entire federal government as binary and fixed at conception. It mandates that all federal documents and policies conform to that definition, prohibits federal funding of what it calls "gender ideology," and directs the Bureau of Prisons and Homeland Security to house transgender women in men's prisons and detention centers, against the guidelines of the Prison Rape Elimination Act.
Passports. Within 48 hours of that order, the State Department froze passport applications from transgender, nonbinary, and intersex Americans, then began returning documents stamped with sex assigned at birth regardless of what the applicant requested or what their other documents say. Lawsuits followed. In November 2025, the Supreme Court allowed the policy to take effect while litigation continues. As of now, if you renew, replace, or apply for a passport, the government decides what sex appears on it. Not you.
The military. Executive Order 14183, signed January 27, 2025, banned transgender people from joining or continuing to serve in the armed forces. The Department of Defense implemented it by February 26. People who had served honorably for years, some for decades, were told their existence was incompatible with "military excellence and readiness."
Sports. Executive Order 14201, February 5, 2025, banning transgender women and girls of all ages from women's and girls' sports. Not pro athletes. All ages. Eight-year-olds.
Healthcare for trans youth. A January 28, 2025 order attempted to cut off gender-affirming care for young people nationwide, followed by an April proclamation labeling that care a form of child abuse. Then in June 2025, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in United States v. Skrmetti that Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors does not violate the Constitution's equal protection guarantee. With that ruling, bans in 25 states stand. Medical care that every major American medical association supports is now criminal to provide across half the country.
Healthcare for trans adults. The administration announced that beginning in plan year 2026, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, which covers more than 8 million federal workers, retirees, and family members, will no longer cover surgical or hormonal gender-affirming care. Adults. Federal employees. People with jobs and insurance they paid into.
And the surveillance. By mid-2026, the Department of Justice was issuing demands that hospitals, including NYU Langone in New York, hand over the identities and private health records of transgender youth patients. Civil rights organizations filed a federal class action in June 2026 to stop it.
Visa bans for trans athletes. The Social Security Administration's civil rights office shuttered. References to transgender people scrubbed from federal websites and documents. The list keeps going, and it is documented line by line by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, KFF, Human Rights Watch, and the ACLU for anyone who wants to verify every word.
That's what "Trump is for you" bought, if you're trans. Now let's talk about what it bought if you're not.
Act Three: The Flip
Because here's the part they were counting on you not watching.
While the cameras pointed at trans kids and bathroom bills, the actual transfer of power was happening in plain sight, and it had nothing to do with pronouns.
The presidency was purchased, openly. Twenty members of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index gave at least $281 million to Trump's 2024 campaign. Elon Musk alone spent roughly $277 million, making him the largest disclosed political donor in the United States. Miriam Adelson gave more than $100 million. Billionaires with a combined net worth exceeding $1.2 trillion bankrolled the campaign and then the inauguration.
The donors became the government. At least 13 billionaires were tapped for the administration, the wealthiest in modern American history, with a combined net worth that could surpass $460 billion. For scale, the previous administration's entire cabinet was worth a combined $118 million. Eight cabinet picks and their spouses had personally donated more than $37 million to the campaign that appointed them. The man who spent $277 million electing the president was handed a chainsaw and the keys to the federal budget.
This is not conspiracy talk. It's Federal Election Commission data and Forbes net worth estimates. They didn't even hide it. That's the insult layered on top of the injury: they did it in front of you, betting that the ads had you watching the decoy.
Then came the bill. In July 2025, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the budget math tells you everything about who this government serves. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Center for American Progress ran the numbers: roughly $1 trillion cut from Medicaid through 2034, and roughly $1 trillion in tax giveaways to the top 1 percent of households over the same period.
One trillion out of healthcare for poor and working people. One trillion into the pockets of the richest people in the country. The same number. It's not a coincidence. It's an invoice.
The CBO projects 11.8 million people will lose health insurance by 2034 under the law, and as many as 16 million when you count the expiration of ACA premium subsidies. The largest Medicaid cuts in American history. The largest food assistance cuts in American history, $285 billion gutted from SNAP. Work-reporting requirements starting in 2027 that experts project will strip coverage from millions of people, many of whom are already working but will drown in the paperwork designed to disqualify them. And after all that "savings," the law still adds at least $3.3 trillion to the national debt, because the cuts to the poor don't come close to covering the gifts to the rich.
Sixteen million people losing healthcare is more than the entire population of Pennsylvania. Were they all trans? Were they all "they/them"? No. They were veterans, seniors in nursing homes, disabled people, rural families, kids. They were the "you" the ad promised to protect.
The Pattern
So let's put the two ledgers side by side, because this is the whole article in four lines.
What trans Americans lost: legal recognition, passports, military careers, healthcare, privacy, safety.
What you got: nothing.
What billionaires spent: a few hundred million dollars.
What billionaires received: the government.
The ad said "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you." Strip away the cruelty and look at it as a financial document, and it was the most honest thing the campaign ever produced. There really was a small group of people the candidate was devoted to. There really was a "them" being served at your expense. The ad just swapped the labels, because "Trump is for thirteen billionaires and the donor class, and you're paying for it" doesn't test well in a focus group.
Trans people were never the threat. They were the magician's flourish, the hand you were told to watch while the other hand signed away your Medicaid, your food assistance, and a trillion dollars of your money. Every dollar of that $65 million-plus in fear ads was an investment, and it paid out a thousandfold, just not to you.
Look at where this points. A government that cuts healthcare for 16 million people while handing a trillion dollars to the top 1 percent is not building a country where support exists when you fall. The pattern in the receipts runs one direction: toward a world where everything that used to be a public good carries a price tag, and your worth is exactly what you can pay. I'm not asking you to take my word for that. I'm asking you to read the ledger and tell me where else it points.
They told you who they were for. You just had to read it in a mirror.
Not left. Not right. Just tired of liars pretending we're stupid.
Sources
• CBS News, "Trump campaign has spent millions on anti-trans ads," October 2024
• ABC News / AdImpact, anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ ad spending analysis, October 2024
• HuffPost / The New York Times / AdImpact, "$65 million on ads targeting trans people," October 2024
• PBS NewsHour, anti-trans ad spending October 7 to 20, 2024 ($95M, 41 percent anti-trans)
• The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, "Trump Administration Civil and Human Rights Rollbacks: By Issue Area"
• Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, "Impact of the Executive Order Redefining Sex," January 2025
• Wikipedia / Federal Register, Executive Orders 14168, 14183, 14201
• Human Rights Watch, "Trump Moves to Restrict Gender-Affirming Care to Federal Workers, Families," September 2025
• KFF, "Overview of President Trump's Executive Actions Impacting LGBTQ+ Health" and "Gender Affirming Care Policy Tracker"
• Supreme Court of the United States, United States v. Skrmetti, decided June 18, 2025
• ACLU, "Supreme Court Allows Trump Administration To Enforce Discriminatory Passport Policy," November 2025; Orr v. Trump case updates
• ACLU / Lambda Legal / NYCLU, federal class action re: DOJ demands for trans youth health records, June 2026
• Bloomberg, "Trump, Harris' Top Billionaire Donors in 2024 Election"
• ABC News, "Trump has tapped an unprecedented 13 billionaires for his administration," December 2024
• CNN, "Big donors secure big roles in the incoming Trump administration," December 2024
• Campaign Legal Center, "Have Wealthy Donors Bought the Trump Administration?", March 2025
• Center for American Progress, "$1 Trillion in Medicaid Cuts, $1 Trillion in Tax Giveaways for the Richest 1 Percent," July 2025
• Congressional Budget Office estimates via FactCheck.org, "Unraveling the Big Beautiful Bill Spin," 2025
• Urban Institute, "Medicaid Cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act," August 2025
• GovFacts, "How the 'One Big, Beautiful Bill' Targets Medicare and Medicaid"
