As Minnesota reels from a series of shootings targeting Democratic lawmakers and their families, Donald Trump Jr. is baselessly claiming that transgender people are in fact the biggest domestic public safety threat, despite no clear evidence that this is the case.
“In leftist states and in blue states, they don’t want to enforce [the law] because they understand that’s their voter base, no different than immigration, so rather than follow the law, they’d rather let them get away with it so they vote for more Democrats again,” Trump said of recent anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles and “No Kings” demonstrations.
Hundreds have been arrested at the ICE protests, while smaller contingents were detained at “No Kings” events across the country, which were largely peaceful.
“Just like the radical transgender movement is per capita the most violent domestic terror threat in America, probably the entire world, because you have all these shooters or murders or attempted murderers in such a tiny population of a country, yet they’re beyond reproach,” Trump continued.
Credible analyses of mass shootings in America suggest that transgender people, who make up around one percent of the population, are either proportionately represented in the ranks of violent incidents, or may be disproportionately underrepresented.
“Is there a serious threat by (transgender people) in terms of violence?” Victor Asal, a University at Albany political science professor, told PolitiFact last year. “If you compare it to extremist right wingers and all sorts of other extremists, I think the answer is very easy. And the answer is no.”
“There’s no evidence whatsoever that trans people are any more dangerous than cisgender people,” Henry Fradella, an Arizona State University professor of criminology and criminal justice who has studied such data, told NBC News.
The Department of Homeland Security’s most recent “Homeland Threat Assessment” makes no explicit mention of transgender people, and the department warned in 2023 that threats of violence against LGBT+ people are on the rise.
Public safety data collection on incidents involving transgender people is confounded by a number of other factors, including sporadic record-keeping practices across police agencies, unreported incidents, and low trust between members of the trans community and the police.
Under the Biden administration, the federal government issued its first national strategy on countering domestic terrorism, which identified white supremacist and anti-government violence as “the most urgent terrorism threat the United States faces today.”
Despite the paucity of evidence, in recent years, right-wing figures, including Donald Trump Jr., have attempted to link mass shootings to some larger alleged danger from transgender people, part of a larger trend of quickly politicizing mass shootings online. After the Minnesota shootings, conspiracists on the right quickly suggested Democrats had somehow ordered an assassination on a top Democratic lawmaker, despite suspect Vance L. Boelter reportedly being a Trump voter with an alleged hit list of Democratic officials and pro-choice advocates.
What the evidence does show is that transgender people are disproportionately likely to be victims of violent crime.
The allegations from the president’s son come as the Trump administration has made a major priority of stripping government protections and access to services from transgender people.
The president has signed an executive order denying the transgender identity federal recognition, and the White House has moved to kick trans people out of the military and block them from accessing services, including healthcare, travel documentation, and protective prison housing in ways that specifically consider their transgender identity.
In a Truth Social post on Sunday calling for mass immigration operations targeting cities that form the “core of the Democrat Power Center,” the president accused Democrats of being “sick of mind” and intentionally destroying cities through their support of policies including what he called “Transgender for Everybody.”
