The Cruelty Is the Point: A President’s War on Trans Americans — and What It Reveals About the Man in the Oval Office.
A sixteen-year-old girl in Boise is dead. A president signs an executive order calling her medical care “mutilation.” And in the pattern of who this administration chooses to hurt — and how casually — we can read the character of a leadership unfit for the office it holds.
When a Boise police detective asked Elyse Thorpe if anyone had wanted to hurt her sixteen-year-old daughter May, Thorpe answered without hesitation. “A lot of America,” she said. May Pollard — a poet, a gamer, a girl who loved sloths and wrote verse and had spent the last year of her life watching the country she lived in decide, one law and one presidential order at a time, that she was not welcome in it — had taken her own life earlier that January morning. She was one of an estimated 1.6 million transgender Americans whom this administration has spent its second term systematically stripping of legal recognition, medical care, service in uniform, and the ordinary dignity of using a public restroom without fear of arrest. May Pollard’s mother was quoted by NBC News in the days after her daughter’s death: “You worry about that hatred being internalized, and that’s what happened to my kid. It got inside.”
This is what happens when a government makes cruelty its organizing principle. It gets inside. It gets inside the sixteen-year-old in Boise, and it will get inside the rest of us next.
The premise of this editorial is simple and, we believe, unavoidable: the way a president treats the smallest and most vulnerable population in the country he governs tells you exactly how he will treat everyone else once his attention turns their way. There is no version of American history in which the persecution of a marginalized minority stops with that minority. And there is no serious reading of the record — from the first-day executive orders, to the emptying of hospital wards, to the appeals to a Supreme Court now permissive of open discrimination — that treats Donald Trump’s war on trans Americans as anything other than a signal of what this administration considers permissible when the cameras eventually pan elsewhere.
“You worry about that hatred being internalized, and that’s what happened to my kid. It got inside.”
— Elyse Thorpe, mother of May Pollard, 16, to NBC News
I. The Federal Machinery of Cruelty
On January 20, 2025 — his first day back in office — Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14168, which he titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism.” The order declared that the United States government would henceforth recognize only two sexes, defined at conception, and directed every federal agency to strip references to gender identity from its policies, forms, and communications. Within hours, Secretary of State Marco Rubio suspended passport applications from transgender and nonbinary Americans who sought to update their gender markers, as The Washington Post reported. American citizens who had lawfully held passports with an “X” marker for years suddenly found themselves unable to renew documents required for international travel, employment, and — in some cases — return home.
Seven days later came Executive Order 14183, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” which barred transgender Americans from serving in the armed forces. The order’s language was unusually explicit in its contempt: it declared that adoption of a gender identity “inconsistent with an individual’s sex” was inherently incompatible with an “honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered the Pentagon to freeze accessions and halt transition-related medical care, purging thousands of trained service members — a policy a federal appeals court has since ruled likely unconstitutional, driven by what U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes called “unconstitutional animus.”
The next day, Executive Order 14187 — titled, without embarrassment, “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” — moved to defund every hospital in America that provides gender-affirming care to patients under nineteen. Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said what the medical establishment could not yet say plainly: the order’s “characterization of medical care for transgender minors bears no resemblance to reality.” By December 2025, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — had issued proposed rules that would cut Medicare and Medicaid funding from any hospital in the country that treats transgender youth. In practice, this means every major hospital.
II. The Documented Human Cost
What follows a policy is not an abstraction, its a body count. The Trevor Project — the nation’s largest suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ+ youth — released its 2025 U.S. National Survey in May 2026, and its findings are the closest thing we have to a public health forensics report on the administration’s first year. They should be read into the Congressional Record.
Suicidal Ideation
Forty percent of transgender and nonbinary young people in America seriously considered suicide in the past year, and one in ten LGBTQ+ youth attempted it. (Trevor Project, 2026)
Direct Attribution
Ninety percent of LGBTQ+ young people surveyed said recent anti-LGBTQ+ laws, policies, and political debates had caused them stress or anxiety. This is not a marginal effect. It is a population-scale wound.
Care Denied
Transgender and nonbinary youth who were unable to access hormones they wanted were nearly twice as likely to attempt suicide as those who could. The administration is systematically closing that access.
Peer-Reviewed Causation
A landmark study in Nature Human Behaviour established that state anti-trans laws caused — not correlated with, caused — up to a seventy-two percent increase in suicide attempts among trans youth in states that enacted them.
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Delaware Rep. Sarah McBride — the first openly transgender member of Congress and, by circumstance, the single most reluctant participant in this national debate — put it in a February 2025 statement reported by The Hill: “Each time the Trump administration attacks a small vulnerable community, the ripple effects of hate echo across our society.” McBride, whose composure has been so steady that even her critics have noted it, was writing about her constituents — but she was also, unmistakably, writing about the country.
III. Idaho as a Preview
The federal machinery does not operate in a vacuum. It operates in concert with state legislatures that have taken the president’s rhetoric as a mandate. Nowhere is this more visible than in Idaho, where May Pollard lived and died.
In April 2026, Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed House Bill 752, a law making it a criminal offense — punishable by up to life in prison — for a trans person to use a bathroom associated with their gender in any restroom in Idaho, including in private businesses. He signed it alongside a second bill banning Pride flags on government buildings. The city of Boise took down the rainbow flag it had flown for a decade. Idaho became the fourth state to criminalize this most basic act of biological necessity, joining Florida, Kansas, and Utah. The bill’s sponsor, State Rep. Barbara Ehardt, has repeatedly defended the legislation on the grounds of “privacy.” The Idaho Democratic Queer Caucus chair, Nikson Mathews, catalogued what has actually been built in his state: “These bills deny health care, criminalize doctors, police public spaces, censor speech, override local control, take away parental rights, restrict privacy and target LGBTQ+ people and families.” Boise Mayor Lauren McLean stood with him.
IV. The Character of a Presidency
There is a temptation, in progressive commentary, to file all of this under “culture war” — as if what is happening to transgender Americans is a policy dispute that will end when this election cycle ends. This is a mistake. It misreads both the pattern and the president.
Every serious leader in American history has been measured, in part, by the treatment of the least powerful people in the country he governs. This is not a matter of ideology; it is a matter of moral competence — the capacity of a person entrusted with the executive power to distinguish between the exercise of that power and its abuse. On this measure, the record is unambiguous. The president has chosen a population that comprises less than one percent of Americans and made it, systematically and by name, the primary target of his federal agencies. He has done so while overseeing an administration in which the leading medical societies of the United States — the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics — have been forced to issue joint statements rejecting HHS characterizations of their standards of care as “negligent” or “ideologically driven.”
What that means, in plain language: the physicians of America have publicly repudiated the health policy of the American government. This is not normal. It is not a “debate.” It is a collision between a working medical consensus and a presidency that has decided, for political benefit, to override it.
“Each time the Trump administration attacks a small vulnerable community, the ripple effects of hate echo across our society.”
— Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.), first openly transgender member of Congress
V. A Pattern of Judgment
The anti-trans agenda is not an isolated policy problem. It is one data point in a broader pattern that has, over the past eighteen months, drawn concern from members of Congress in both parties. In January 2026, the president sent a text message to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre suggesting the United States would take control of Greenland because he had not been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In April, on Easter Sunday, he posted a profanity-laced threat to bomb civilian infrastructure in Iran. In each case, sitting members of Congress — including Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove of California, and Rep. Eric Swalwell of California — publicly called for the invocation of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.
The persecution of trans Americans belongs on that list. Not because criminalizing a girl’s use of a public restroom is the same as threatening to bomb Iran — but because both proceed from the same faculty of judgment. Both reveal a leader who reaches for cruelty as a first instinct, who mistakes impulsivity for strength, and who has staffed his government with officials chosen not for competence but for their willingness to execute those instincts without objection.
The Twenty-Fifth Amendment and the Question of Fitness
The Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1967, provides in Section 4 that if the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet transmit to Congress a written declaration that “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” the Vice President immediately assumes the office as Acting President. It was drafted in the wake of the Kennedy assassination to answer a question the Founders had left unanswered: what happens when a president cannot govern.
The Argument Being Made
The lawmakers now publicly calling for Section 4 to be invoked — including Sens. Ed Markey and Chris Murphy, and Reps. Ansari, Swalwell, and Kamlager-Dove — argue that “inability to discharge the powers and duties” cannot be read to mean only medical unconsciousness. It must extend, they contend, to a demonstrated pattern of erratic decision-making, impulsive foreign-policy threats, and the deliberate use of federal power to harm identifiable Americans. Sen. Chris Murphy, reacting to the president’s April 2026 Easter post, wrote plainly: “If I were in Trump’s Cabinet, I would spend Easter calling constitutional lawyers about the 25th Amendment. This is completely, utterly unhinged.”
The Practical Barrier — Honestly Named
Section 4 requires the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet — officials the president himself selected — to act. This administration was staffed, deliberately, with loyalists chosen for the express purpose of preventing exactly the kind of internal check the amendment contemplates. The mechanism will not, in the near term, be invoked. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Why the Barrier Does Not End the Argument
The Twenty-Fifth Amendment is not the only accountability mechanism the Constitution offers, and its practical unavailability does not settle the underlying question — which is whether this president is fit for the office he holds. The persecution of trans Americans is the clearest sustained evidence, in a single policy portfolio, that he is not. A leadership that measures its accomplishments by the pain it inflicts on a sixteen-year-old girl in Idaho does not become fit merely because his own Cabinet refuses to say so. The moral case for accountability — through Congressional oversight, through the courts, through the ballot box, and through the historical record — remains, and it grows with every hospital that closes its doors, every service member forced out of uniform, and every family that buries a child.
VI. What This Portends
Persecution of the vulnerable is a rehearsal. It always has been. The administrative infrastructure being built to erase transgender Americans from federal recognition — the redefinition of statutory categories by executive fiat, the withdrawal of medical funding as political weapon, the criminalization of ordinary daily activity — is not going to be dismantled once it has been built. It will be aimed at whoever the political needs of the moment require.
The passport policy is a template for how citizenship documents can be selectively denied. The hospital defunding is a template for how federal money can be used to coerce private medical practice. The military ban is a template for how public employment can be conditioned on political conformity. Every American who imagines that these tools will remain pointed at a small population they do not belong to has forgotten, or has never learned, how governments work.
May Pollard was sixteen years old. Her parents, Elyse Thorpe and Joseph Pollard, are speaking publicly now — after their daughter’s death, in a country whose president used his inaugural address to declare her a fiction — because they understand something that we refuse to look away from: what got inside their child will not stop with their child.
Editorial Conclusion
A president is measured by how he treats the people who cannot defend themselves against him. On that measure, the record of this administration is finished — and it is a record of chosen, deliberate, documented cruelty against the smallest and most vulnerable population in America.
The war on trans Americans is not a distraction from the character of this presidency. It is the character of this presidency. And a country that permits the least of us to be sacrificed for political theater will not be permitted, for long, to think of itself as free.
Sources & References
- NBC News — “Idaho pushed anti-trans laws for years. Then a teen died.” Read →
- LGBTQ Nation — “GOP gov. signs anti-trans bathroom bill with possible prison for life & a rainbow flag ban” Read →
- Washington Post — “What Trump’s executive order on gender means for passports with an X” Read →
- NBC News — “Trump signs executive orders proclaiming there are only two biological sexes” Read →
- Wikipedia — “Executive Order 14183: Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness” Read →
- CBS News — “Divided appeals court rules Trump administration’s ban on transgender military service is unconstitutional” Read →
- UPI / Yahoo News — “Trump signs executive order to restrict gender-affirming care for minors” Read →
- STAT News — “In major effort to end gender-affirming care, Trump administration takes aim at hospitals” Read →
- CNN — “Trump moves to ban transgender care for minors by targeting hospitals” Read →
- The Trevor Project — “2025 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People” Read →
- The Trevor Project — “Study Shows LGBTQ+ Youth Face High Rates of Suicidality, Worsened by Anti-LGBTQ+ Politics” Read →
- NBC News — “Study establishes first causal link between anti-trans laws and suicide attempts” Read →
- The Hill — “McBride slams Trump orders on transgender rights” Read →
- Idaho Capital Sun / Yahoo — “Idaho activists, officials decry anti-LGBTQ+ bills as House passes trans bathroom ban” Read →
- SCOTUSblog — “Supreme Court allows Trump to ban transgender people from military” Read →
- Columbia Climate Law — “HHS Publishes Report Pushing Discredited Theory about Gender-Affirming Care” Read →
- TIME — “Can the 25th Amendment Be Used to Remove Trump From Office?” Read →
- PBS NewsHour — “Could the 25th Amendment be invoked against Trump? Here’s how it works” Read →
- Prism — “Anti-transgender legislation accelerates in early 2026” Read →
- ACLU — “Mapping Attacks on LGBTQ Rights in U.S. State Legislatures in 2026” Read →
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