Trump Backs Pride Flag Ban as Allies Spread False Claims Tying Transgender People to Violence

After false claims spread last week that a transgender person was behind the fatal shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, US President Donald Trump and his allies are continuing to push the erroneous narrative that the transgender community is a danger to the American public.

Trump on Monday said that he'd consider banning LGBTQ pride flags as his political allies ratcheted up dehumanizing rhetoric.

During an exchange in the Oval Office, Real America's Voice correspondent Brian Glenn showed Trump a photo of a trans flag currently on display in Washington, DC, and claimed that "a lot of people are very threatened" by it.

"Would you be opposed to taking this flag down, up and down the streets of DC?" Glenn asked.

"Well, I wouldn't be," Trump replied. "Then they'll sue and they'll get freedom of speech stuff, you know, so that'll happen. But I would have no problem with it."

Trump then pivoted to saying that he wanted anyone who burned an American flag to "go to jail immediately."

The day after the president signaled his support for banning transgender pride flags, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) likened the transgender rights movement to a “cancer” and suggested detaining all transgender people in the United States.

In an interview with Newsmax, Jackson baselessly said that transgender women "have an underlying level of aggressiveness" and suggested they be forcibly committed to mental institutions.

"We have to treat these people," he said. "We have to get them off the streets, and we have to get them off the internet, and we can't let them communicate with each other. I'm all about free speech, but this is a virus, this is a cancer that's spreading across this country."

In response to Trump's attack on the transgender flag, ACLU communications strategist Gillian Branstetter pointed out that the transgender activist who created the symbol, Monica Helms, recently left the US "for fear of her safety as a trans person under Trump."

After the assassination of Kirk—who also falsely connected transgender people to mass shootings with no evidence—right-wing commentators quickly reacted by claiming the attacker was transgender and federal agents reported early on in their investigation that symbols of "transgender ideology" were found at the crime scene—a claim that was amplified by the Wall Street Journal.

In reality, mass shootings carried out by transgender individuals represent a minuscule fraction of the total number of mass shootings carried out in the US, and there is no evidence that transgender people are disproportionately likely to engage in acts of violence.

Laura Loomer, once a fringe far-right internet commentator and conspiracy theorist who is now an influential informal adviser to the president, has also been ramping up attacks against the transgender movement, and she even went so far this week as to demand that gender-affirming care be completely banned by executive order.

"It’s time to designate the transgender movement as a terrorist movement," she wrote in a social media post. "Trans people are a threat to society. We can’t allow them to continue killing people. They need to be socially ostracized and the president should make medical transitioning ILLEGAL in our country."

Conservative attacks on the transgender movement have persisted in the wake of the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, despite the fact that the alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, was not himself transgender.

Evidence released by prosecutors on Tuesday showed that Robinson's transgender partner refused Robinson's request to delete incriminating text messages the two had exchanged. The partner subsequently shared these messages with law enforcement.