Donald Trump is getting mocked for, according to some people, transparently making up a Democrat who wants “men playing women’s sports” in order to dodge a question about the economy during an interview that aired this weekend on 60 Minutes.

“Can I ask you about the economy?” reporter Norah O’Donnell said in the interview.

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“These are 99 to 1 issues!” Trump said, rambling. “And they don’t change! I just watched this morning-“

“Mr. President, can I ask you about the economy?” O’Donnell repeated.

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“Yeah, just one thing, I watched a show this morning where a very well-known Democrat Congressman was fighting like hell for men playing in women’s sports. They don’t change.”

“Who?” O’Donnell asked.

Trump didn’t say he forgot; instead, he refused to answer, as if he was suddenly too polite to name names.

“I don’t want to tell you,” he said. “You’ll be able to check it. Just check your local TV.”

TRUMP: I watched a show this morning where a very well-known Democrat Congressman was fighting like hell for men playing in women's sports.

O'DONNELL: Who was that?

TRUMP: I don't want to tell you. You'll be able to check it. Just check your local TV. pic.twitter.com/PDJkGwhTa4

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 3, 2025

It’s not clear who he could have been referring to. There are no Democrats in Congress who support allowing men to play women’s sports.

Many do support allowing trans women to participate in sports as their gender. Not only did Trump not say that, though, but elected Democrats at the federal level tend not to bring up trans athletes that often in interviews.

Moreover, online commenters pointed out that it was out of character for Trump not to name the person he was talking about, leading them to believe he was lying.

Like everything he says… pic.twitter.com/nNtwnyLXxc

— ⚘️Carina (@Carina_Amyth) November 3, 2025

And just like that, she moves on.

When will media hold him to account in his lies? That’s why he thinks he’s the smartest man and everyone else is stupid!

— THE PPL vs. OLIGARCHS (@boss_bigXY) November 3, 2025

It's a secret that even the Internet knows nothing about. pic.twitter.com/U2LtkZdBGj

— Jimbar99 (@jimbar99) November 3, 2025

How the fuck do you not follow up?

“I don’t want to tell you” Why would this be a secret? He either doesn’t remember because he’s in mental decline or he made it up. Neither is good and he should be pressed until he answers. Media is a joke. https://t.co/RlhR4floZV

— Monkey Chunk (@ChunkMonkeys) November 3, 2025

pic.twitter.com/80XuLHcXK8

— jay lauscher (@jaylauscher) November 3, 2025

Let’s be clear: Trump lied about a Democrat “fighting like hell for men in women’s sports.” When Norah O’Donnell asked who, he basically said “trust me, bro”—and she just let it slide. Another gutless performance from the media. Too timid to call out a con man in real time. pic.twitter.com/cfLfPdMsCY

— Russell Drew (@RussOnPolitics) November 3, 2025

Trump’s brain is like an Etch A Sketch. Every time he shakes his head, the details disappear. “Check your local TV” sounds like the new MAGA version of “trust me, bro.”

— Chetter 📢🗽⚖💙 Beacon for Democracy (@ChetterHub) November 3, 2025

There is no fucking way that a "well known Democrat Congressman" said anything remotely close to what Trump is claiming. This is the same narrative that they used in '24. Democrats don't believe this shit but Fox Nation eats it up with a spoon.

— Eric (@Ericland55) November 3, 2025

Which "local TV" station should we check?

No matter what the occasion, TACO has to throw in his transphobia. pic.twitter.com/usaMb06Aqc

— D Villella❄️🇺🇸 🦅 (@dvillella) November 3, 2025

pic.twitter.com/5c0334V3ln

— TedCruzSucks. (@TedResist) November 3, 2025

Me when I just make shit up.

— Tracee (@TraceeM) November 3, 2025

“I don't want to tell you.”

What he’s really saying is “I can’t tell you since I’m just making it up.”

What he’s really thinking is “My worshippers will believe this; they believe anything I tell them.”

— The Solutions Party (@_SolutionsParty) November 3, 2025

@NorahODonnell Translation: he didn't see a Dem congressman do that on his TV, he probably saw someone accuse Democrats of doing that on Fox or Newsmax or some other magamedia. Why don't you ever push back?

— TomHB (@TinPotPourri) November 3, 2025

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Anti-LGBTQ+ “manosphere” influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate have publicly condemned the antisemitic views of white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes after video captured the Tates partying with Fuentes and other right-wingers while bopping along to “Heil Hitler,” a song created by neo-Nazi Rapper Ye (formerly Kanye West).

Videos showed the Tates and Fuentes riding in a luxury vehicle along with influencers known as Clavicular, Sneako, Myron Gaines, and Justin Waller. Some of the men threw Nazi salutes while the vehicle traveled to the Vendôme nightclub in Miami Beach, Florida.

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Employees at the Vendôme bar played the song again while the men and other bar-goers chanted Hitler‘s name in celebration, raised their arms in salute, and treated the tune like a fun party anthem.

The video from the bar generated widespread outrage: Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner said he was “deeply disturbed and disgusted” by the video, and noted that Hitler orchestrated the murder of over 6 million Jews and others (including the families of Meiner’s grandparents).

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Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, Sneako, Tristan Tate, Clavicular, Myron, and Justin Waller arrive at the club playing Ye’s banned song https://t.co/P6647gMJ0G

— FearBuck (@FearedBuck) January 18, 2026

In a statement posted on Instagram, the bar said it does “not condone antisemitism, hate speech, or prejudice of any kind,” said it has banned the aforementioned right-wing influencers, and announced that it had fired three people involved with playing Ye’s pro-Hitler anthem.

Meanwhile, the Tate brothers’ attorney, Joseph McBride, told TMZ that the Tate brothers “condemn antisemitism and any glorification of Adolf Hitler.” McBride said that the Tates were hanging out with neo-Nazis “not [as] an endorsement of anyone’s views,” but rather as “defense of a principle” for free speech.

UPDATE: Miami club Vendôme has fired multiple employees for playing “Heil Hitler” at the request of antisemitic streamers Nick Fuentes, Sneako, and Myron Gaines — who have been banned from nearly every club in Miami.

The customer is, in fact, not always right. pic.twitter.com/7ODN2QcYod

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) January 20, 2026

Andrew Tate and his brother are currently facing several legal investigations in Romania and the U.K. for rape and child sex trafficking charges. In past comments, Andrew Tate has said men who enjoy heterosexual sex purely for pleasure (rather than for creating children) are actually gay. He has also said that women belong in the home, are men’s property, and bear responsibility for when they are raped.

Fuentes has referred to Black people as n-words, said that “the GOP is run by Jews, atheists, and homosexuals,” described Adolf Hitler as “really fu**ing cool,” has cast doubt that the Holocaust happened, said “perfidious Jews” must “be given the death penalty” after “we take power,” and said, “A lot of women want to be raped… They want a guy to beat the s**t out of them.”

In February 2025, Ye was sued and dropped by his talent agency, 33 & West, after he published a series of antisemitic social media messages, including, “I’m a Nazi … I love Hitler.” During the 2025 Super Bowl, Ye advertised the website of his fashion brand Yeezy, which prominently featured a swastika T-shirt for sale.

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A series of anti-LGBTQ+ riders attached to several large spending bills in Congress were removed from the bill to fund the Departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services, the latest draft of which was published yesterday. Democrats are claiming credit for having successfully worked to remove them.

The riders – which would have banned all federal funding from supporting gender-affirming care at any age, banned colleges and universities from letting trans people participate in sports or other activities, and banned K-12 schools from taking measures to support trans kids like letting them use the restroom of their gender – were attached to the $224 billion Fiscal Year 2026 Labor, HHS, Education and Related Agencies funding bill late last year.

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Independent journalist Erin Reed reports that the riders (or provisions in a funding bill unrelated to funding agencies) have been removed from the latest draft, which must be passed by January 30 to keep the government fully funded.

“The bills are strikingly clean,” Reed wrote. “Now, the package has been released—and for the moment, transgender people can breathe again.”

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Congressional Democrats are claiming credit for removing those provisions.

“Rep. McBride works closely with her colleagues every day to defend the rights of all her constituents, including LGBTQ people across Delaware,” a spokesperson for out Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE) told Reed. “She was proud to work relentlessly with her colleagues in ensuring these funding bills did not include anti-LGBTQ provisions. It takes strong allies in leadership and on committees to rein in the worst excesses of this Republican trifecta, Rep. McBride remains grateful to Ranking Members [Rep. Rosa] DeLauro, [Sen. Patty] Murray, and Democratic leadership for prioritizing the removal of these harmful riders.”

“This latest funding package continues Congress’s forceful rejection of extreme cuts to federal programs proposed by [the president],” said House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) in a statement. “Where the White House attempted to eliminate entire programs, we chose to increase their funding. Where the Administration proposed slashing resources, we chose to sustain funding at current levels.”

According to DeLauro’s summary of the bill, it will also increase funding for the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program and more than double funding for HHS’s minority HIV/AIDS Initiative.

Bills to fund the Departments of Homeland Security; Defense; Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development were also released yesterday. The bills altogether represent $1.2 trillion in federal funding.

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During a nearly two-hour stint at the podium in the White House Briefing Room, Donald Trump claimed a bystander who was present during the killing of Renee Nicole Good was a “professional agitator” because her yelling was too good.

Trump opened the briefing by sharing photographs of immigrants in Minnesota who he said had been charged with crimes. He held up their photos on flyers that were headed in bold, “Minnesota Worst of Worst.”

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He then accused anti-ICE protestors of being paid before he brought up Good. He didn’t use her name, instead referring to her as “the woman.”

“When the woman was shot, and I felt terribly about that, and I understand both sides of it, but when she was shot, there was another woman that was screaming, ‘Shame, shame, shame, shame’… So loud, like a professional opera singer, she was so loud. And so professional,” he said.

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“She wasn’t a woman that was hurt like, ‘Oh, my heart’s injured.’ She was a professional. ‘Shame, shame!’ she’s screaming, ‘Shame, shame!’ I said, that’s not a normal person. That’s a professional. These are professional agitators and professional people that want to see our country do badly. But that’s not happening ’cause we have the hottest country anywhere in the world despite this stuff.”

Viral video footage from Good’s death shows ICE officer Jonathan Ross lethally shooting the 37-year-old queer mother of three as she tried to drive her car away from ICE agents telling her to “get out of the f**king car” so they could apprehend her. Ross could then be heard calling her a “f**king b**ch” before fleeing the scene.

But according to Trump, the real villain was the woman shouting “shame,” not the agent who shot Good three times in the face.

Trump often claims that liberal protestors are “professional agitators” to discredit them, not as a statement of fact. Last week, he accused Good, herself, of being one. He referred to her wife, Becca Good, as her “friend” and said that they were both “highly disrespectful of law enforcement.”

“They were harassing, they were following for days and for hours, and I think frankly, they were professional agitators. And I’d like to find out- We are going to find out who’s paying for it, with their brand-new signs and all their [inaudible],” Trump said. There is no reason to believe that the Goods were paid for anything related to what happened.

Trump also posted on Truth Social after the killing and called Good “very disorderly,” saying that she “viciously ran over the ICE Officer,” which contradicts multiple videos shot of the interaction.

After his comment on Good’s death at the press briefing, Trump went back to sharing photos of alleged immigrant criminals, claiming his administration is expelling thousands of dangerous people from Minneapolis. In reality, ICE agents have been violently snatching Hispanic people at will, regardless of citizenship status, criminal history, or anything else.

Last week, for example, ICE agents rammed the vehicle of Christina Rank, a teacher for special needs students at Concord Education Center Middle School, then broke her window to pull her out of the vehicle, and took her into custody (leaving her car unattended), according to Bring Me The News. Rank’s mother said she wasn’t allowed to speak with her daughter, nor was she told why she was apprehended — ICE released her twelve hours after her arrest.

Out Rep. Angie Craig (D-MN) has compared Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to Nazis. She is part of a small group of Congress members who plan to introduce an impeachment resolution against Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, who has called Good a “domestic terrorist.”

While DHS claims that ICE agents use aggressive tactics against people who stalk and obstruct their law enforcement activities, Craig said, “I don’t think any city in America, or any state in America has ever seen this type of lawless behavior by federal law enforcement.”

“Every American should be outraged. Every Minnesotan should be outraged, and at the same time, we should continue to peacefully protest what’s happening,” Craig told Cabrera. “I’ve never seen such an out-of-control agency.”

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Out CNN anchor Anderson Cooper was stunned by a New York Times report that found Donald Trump’s personal wealth has grown by over $1.4 billion since he took office for the second time.

The estimate by the Times editorial board included earnings from cryptocurrency investments, licensing of Trump’s name, Amazon’s documentary on the first lady, and overseas real estate ventures.

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“It is staggering,” Cooper said while speaking to Times investigative reporter Russ Buettner.

“It’s absolutely shocking,” Buettner agreed.

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“This amount is really greater than the sum total of everything he made from his inheritance, from being on The Apprentice, and from all the licensing deals while he was on The Apprentice.”

“And this is just the first year,” Cooper pointed out. “They’re open for business.”

Cryptocurrency investments, Buettner said, have been the Trump family’s biggest earners, estimating the Trumps have raked in about $800 million from those investments this year alone.

Buettner also pointed out the many conflicts of interest related to these earnings. “The cryptocurrency money comes to them anonymously… most of it comes from overseas entities.” He pointed out that a big deal with the United Arab Emirates utilized a Trump cryptocurrency to pay for a $2 billion investment.

“It was brand new and struggling and unproven, and they did that, that will put about 80 to 100 million dollars a year in the pockets of the Trumps.”

He said that after that, within a few weeks, Trump overturned a policy that “had long rejected the UAE’s pleas to get AI computer chips from us because they were thought to be too close to China.”

“He just did away with that,” Buettner said, “and then pardoned the fellow who was on the other end of the deal.”

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Every time an extremist politician attacks a transgender kid to score political points, they are counting on silence. They expect no one to fight back. They assume cruelty will go unanswered.

They’re wrong.

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Transgender Americans make up roughly one percent of the U.S. population, yet in a moment defined by economic anxiety and political dysfunction, the trans community, especially kids, has been turned into a punching bag by extremist politicians. In 2025 alone, more than 600 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced in state legislatures. These are coordinated attempts to legislate fear, erase dignity, and villainize trans people out of public life.

Elected officials who claim to believe in the sanctity of human life – in freedom, in liberty, and in justice for all – continue to deny transgender Americans basic freedoms and rights. And the consequences are deadly. Between November 2023 and November 2024, at least 36 transgender and gender-expansive people were killed. Half of them were Black trans women. Further, transgender youth report significantly increased rates of depression and suicidality compared to their cisgender peers. These attacks are not abstract cultural debates; they are creating a measurable crisis in people’s lives. 

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That crisis is why we decided to fight back.

I am part of a team of political strategists who launched Fight for Our Rights PAC to defeat anti-LGBTQ+ bullies where it hurts them most: at the ballot box. This organization seeks to defeat candidates who proudly run on transphobic hate – those who sponsor bans on gender-affirming care, who push so-called “parents’ rights” bills designed to isolate trans kids, and who use their platforms to demean and dehumanize people simply trying to live. 

This is a moral fight, and it goes beyond transphobia. We know that those who seek to remove what little protections the transgender community has secured will not stop there. These same factions are already setting their sights on marriage equality and beyond, but our strategy is working.

In 2025, Republicans spent millions of dollars on anti-trans ads. The Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, Winsome Earle-Sears, spent a whopping 57% of her entire media budget on them.

The attack lines were familiar: fearmongering about bathrooms, sports, and kids who just want to exist. And voters rejected it. Every one of the six bullies on the ballots we targeted in Virginia and New Jersey – including Mark Earley Jr., uno, Nancy Muñoz, and Michele Matsikoudis – lost and were replaced by equality supporters. Voters in those states sent a clear message: They want leaders who protect kids, not politicians who pick on them.

From the beginning, we deliberately chose not to center our campaigns on trans people as a political debate. Extremist politicians want that fight. They flood the airwaves with fear because they believe it will distract voters from their own records. We refused to help them do that.

Instead, we focused on accountability. Voters consistently prioritized affordability, health care, and economic security over culture-war attacks, even in races saturated with anti-trans messaging. Many of the lawmakers attacking trans kids had long voting records that were deeply out of step with their districts. By focusing on those records, we kept the conversation on leadership, competence, and the issues voters face every day.

We showed voters the full record. In Virginia, that meant exposing lawmakers who sided with Big Pharma to keep prescription drug prices high, voted against paid family and medical leave, and pushed extreme abortion bans with no exceptions. In New Jersey, it meant holding candidates accountable for aligning with far-right agendas while ignoring local priorities. Once voters saw that pattern, the culture-war rhetoric lost its power.

These victories were not accidents, but rather the results of disciplined strategy: anticipating attacks, testing messaging, responding clearly and immediately, and then turning the conversation back to what voters actually care about – safety, the economy, stability, and freedom. 

While too many candidates still freeze or fumble when asked about trans people, our allies showed what courage looks like: refusing to take the bait, refusing to backpedal, and refusing to let extremists define the narrative. That is how you beat bullies.

And to the young trans people reading this: You are not alone.

There are adults across this country waking up every morning determined to make life safer for you. We are fighting for your dignity, your joy, your future. This fight is unfortunately far from over, but we will not stop.

Chris Cormier Maggiano, President and Founder of Cormier & Company, advises funders, issue advocates, and movement leaders to achieve their policy, political, and philanthropic goals. As a donor advisor and political strategist, Chris specializes in the intersection of progressive public policy, national campaigns, and funder engagement. Chris serves on the board of the Movement Advancement Project and lives in New York City with his husband, daughter, and squirrel-obsessed Pointer Hound, Easton. Chris holds a bachelor’s in architecture from Carnegie Mellon University and is an avid New England sports fan.

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