Yesterday, during a publicity stunt that was supposed to be about taxes, Donald Trump just randomly brought up how much he doesn’t like it when transgender women play sports.

“Do you think that men should play in women’s sports?” he asked the DoorDasher, who was there to talk about “no tax on tips.”

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“I really don’t have an opinion on that,” she responded. Trump pressed her on it. He wanted a reaction, and he wasn’t willing to accept that she – like most people, actually – just plainly doesn’t care about this issue.

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One way to read the interaction is that Trump really doesn’t like trans people, and he wanted her to join him in his two-minute hate. But another (better, I will argue) way to read it is that Trump likes getting applause, and he wanted something – her agreeing with him while laughing, perhaps; her thanking him for his executive order banning trans women from some sports; maybe even her pulling a shiny trophy out to give to him… – but she didn’t give him the reaction he wanted. So the situation got awkward until he moved on to another topic.

This wouldn’t be worth remarking on if it didn’t happen a lot, but Trump brings up trans issues for no reason while talking about unrelated topics quite often. It happens so often that we don’t cover each instance of it at LGBTQ Nation because we couldn’t possibly devote time to every instance.

He has been doing this since at least 2022, about a year after the anti-trans moral panic started sweeping the nation, with red states passing bans on trans health care and trans sports participation — things that they didn’t feel the need to regulate in previous decades.

At one rally in 2022, Trump even commented about how attacking trans people gets him applause. He was listing things that he didn’t like about Democrats, and when he got to “transgender insanity,” he got wild applause. Many of his MAGA supporters even got out of their seats to give him a standing ovation.

“I talk about transgender, everyone goes crazy,” he remarked at the time. “Who would have thought? Five years ago, you didn’t know what the hell it was.”

After that, attacking trans people became a mainstay of his rallies. That included his impression of a woman powerlifter, which was widely mocked by liberals since it looks like he was… not getting enough fiber. He would perform this impression to show that cis women are bad at sports, then he would do his impression of a trans powerlifter picking up the weight with ease, since to him, trans women are men, and men don’t even need to try to beat women at sports.

Liberals made fun of him for doing this impression so many times, but Trump’s need for approval is so great that he wasn’t going to be deterred by some TV mockery. He wanted applause, and his MAGA audience kept on giving it to him. Why be innovative when he’s getting what he wants?