What Democrats really believe seems too insane to be true

Reprinted with permission from Tablet magazine.In the September debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Trump said something so ludicrous that many viewers must have dismissed it out of hand.“She did things that nobody would ever think of,” Trump said, while rattling off a list of some of the vice president’s most radical past positions.“Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.”The idea that the vice president “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison” seemed so patently absurd that The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser cited it in a column posted the next morning as an example of Trump’s lunacy: “What the hell was he talking about?” Glasser wrote of the trans operation lines.

“No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris’ point.”That reaction was understandable — the idea of the operations was, as Trump himself said, a “thing nobody would ever think of.”The problem was that it is true.As CNN had reported that week, Harris, when running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, had written in an ACLU questionnaire that she supported publicly funded “gender-affirming care,” including transition surgeries, for federal prison inmates and detained illegal immigrants.Follow-up reporting from The Washington Free Beacon revealed that while serving as California attorney general, Harris had in fact implemented a statewide policy of taxpayer funding for prisoners’ sex changes, born out of a settlement in which she agreed to pay for the transition of a man convicted of kidnapping a father of three and then murdering him as he begged for his life.Harris later bragged, on camera, about this policy as evidence of her commitment to the progressive “movement” — in a clip that has since become a staple of Trump campaign ads.The sequence of events neatly encapsulated a pattern that has played out countless times since Trump entered American political life.Trump sa...