Trump claims Talarico said Jesus ‘would be promoting sex changes for little children’

Donald Trump has a new verse for the Texas Senate race, and it isn’t in any Bible we could find. At Tuesday’s rally in Lubbock, he went after Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, claimed Talarico had said God is transgender, then topped it: “He actually said that if Jesus Christ himself came and visited the Texas legislature, Jesus would be promoting sex changes for little children.” That’s his claim, and he gave no source. The nearest thing on the record is a January 2023 interfaith service welcoming the new Legislature, where Talarico imagined Jesus visiting it and rewriting the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the trans children who are bullied.” Bullied kids, yes. Sex changes, no.

He’d warmed up with drag shows (“I like about nine of them,” he says Talarico answered, before adding, “I don’t know of any”). Then he cued the screens: “So take a look at this. It’s not good. Take a look.”

The video that played is a cut-together montage of old Talarico clips, and it undercuts his paraphrase. On it, Talarico says “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between” and “God is non-binary.” Non-binary, not transgender. Talarico said that on the Texas House floor in October 2021, while opposing a bill on which school sports teams trans students could play on. He has since said his point was that “God is beyond gender.”

The actual record on kids and medicine: Talarico voted against Texas’s 2023 ban on gender-transition care for minors, backed a failed amendment to narrow it to surgery, and now says he opposes gender-reassignment surgery for minors. That’s a vote you can argue with. It isn’t Jesus promoting anything.