Last week, the Republican Party held something we don’t normally see: a Midterm Convention. It was a ridiculous event in many ways, but there’s one quote from President Trump’s speech that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about, and that I haven’t seen get much attention.
…I’m petrified that they’ll change and they’ll say, “You know what? Men should not be playing in women’s sport,” and that will really hurt us. That’s one of our great sound bites of all time. And I thought after we won in a landslide in the last election, they would change that. But I saw two senators and a congressman in the last week and a half on television, fighting like hell for men to play in women’s sports. And I hope they continue to do that.
Donald Trump, Republican Midterm Convention, Dallas, September 9, 2026 (transcript)
Set aside for now whether he’s even right1 about where Democrats stand. What stuck with me is that it’s something he says is hurting the country, and something he wants to continue. It shouldn’t be surprising, but there was a nakedness to this way of treating politics as a game. Usually, there’s at least some attempt to claim a result is a priority: there’s some bill you want to get passed, or some program you want to get funded…anything. Here though, it’s not about accomplishing anything, just about “winning”.
We’ve seen things like this before. At the end of President Biden’s administration, Congress was all set to pass a bipartisan border security bill until Trump asked Republicans in the Senate not to, so it could stay a live issue in the election. Or going back to 2010, Mitch McConnell said his priority was denying a second term to President Obama. Hearing it in the speech though, it felt so much more raw to me. It reminded me of being a child, forced to listen to my father delight in scoring points against my mother while making life harder for us children.
When we think about what’s wrong with our country and our discourse, this is a perfect example of what frustrates me. What’s left of the Republican Party likes to talk about “American values”, but the true thing that defines us as a people should be working together towards building a better America, not ostracizing each other over where we were born or the colour of our skin.
There’s obviously plenty I think the Republican Party is wrong about, but my hope is that they come around and change their views on those things, not that they continue to hold those positions and lose over them. We should get back to fighting about ideas, not identity.
- He’s not. Most Democrats have adopted more nuanced positions around trans rights: that there are situations where a biological difference is just a fact and needs to be acknowledged, and others where it makes no difference whatsoever and focusing on them is inhumane discrimination. With Vice President Vance talking about Democrats obsessing over trans youth, it strikes me that it’s usually the Republican Party centering the issue, and it’s absurd that anyone thinks someone having a potential advantage in sports is the issue worth spewing vitriol against fellow Americans over. ↩︎