In a strange and trolling display of false equivalence on Thursday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) responded to a reporter’s question about Donald Trump’s intention to nominate former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) as his attorney general by sharing a picture of trans Admiral Rachel Levine and nonbinary former Department of Energy official Sam Brinton.

Johnson, at the ready, pulled the photo from his suit jacket pocket when the question came up.

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“Here’s my answer,” Johnson said as he extracted the pic and held it up for reporters.

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 “Did you harass Democratic senators on those nominees?” he added, not explaining what the issue was with them at the time they were nominated other than their gender identities.

The gesture perpetuated MAGA Republicans’ reliance in the 2024 campaign on trans and gender-fluid individuals to illustrate a “radical” Democratic agenda and inspire their base to the polls. Johnson’s stunt indicates they’ll continue that strategy of demonization in service of Trump’s goals as president.

“The President has been given the opportunity to fill his administration with people that he wants,” Johnson said of Gaetz and the president-elect’s other personnel choices. “He’s got an impressive agenda, so he needs people who will try and implement it aggressively.”

Trump announced his intention to nominate Gaetz — who has been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for potential lobbying violations, illicit drug use, and connections to sex trafficking — on Wednesday. The Florida rep resigned from the House immediately, short-circuiting any further action by the Ethics Committee, including publication of the committee’s report, which would have happened today if he were still a member of Congress.

Johnson elaborated on Gaetz’s nomination in an interview with the right-wing Newsmax network, where he again diverted attention from Gaetz’s qualifications and ethical shortcomings to Levine and Brinton.

Asked about the Ethics Committee report on Gaetz, Johnson responded with another “what about trans people” evasion.

“I haven’t seen those findings. Pretty interesting when you consider some of the nominees that President Trump or President Biden put forward,” he said.

“Sam Brinton, who ended up being convicted of stealing women’s suitcases off the baggage carousel. Rachel Levine — I mean, I didn’t hear, I didn’t see reporters approaching Democrat senators in the Capital Hill hallways here, you know, just asking them all kinds of questions about those nominees.”

If anything, Johnson has been consistent in his talking points.

Brinton, a nuclear engineer, has been a right-wing nonbinary poster child for “woke” culture infecting government bureaucracy since they were caught on camera stealing luggage from an airport carousel in 2022 and fired from the Department of Energy. They were featured prominently in the multi-million-dollar trans attack ad campaign mounted by Republicans in this year’s election, as was Levine.

Levine, Assistant Secretary for Health at the Department of Health and Human Services and an admiral in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, came to her positions after a long career in public health as a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the Penn State College of Medicine, as the Pennsylvania physician general and later as secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Health.

Levine was confirmed by the Senate for her current role with two Republican votes.

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