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UNITED STATES — President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to “stop the transgender lunacy” on day one of his presidency, as Republicans prepare to control both chambers of Congress and the White House by pushing against LGBTQ rights.
Transgender issues have roiled US politics in recent years, as Democratic- and Republican-controlled states have moved in opposite directions on policy such as medical treatment and what books on the topic are allowed in public or school libraries.
Trump speaking at an event for young conservatives in Phoenix, Arizona said, “I will sign executive orders to end child sexual mutilation, get transgender out of the military and out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools."
He also vowed to “keep men out of women’s sports,” adding that “it will be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.”
Speaking to the AmericaFest conference in a border state he easily carried in the November election, Trump also promised immediate measures against “migrant crime,” vowed to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and doubled down on his talk of restoring US control of the Panama Canal.
Last week, when the US Congress approved its annual defense budget, it included a provision to block funding of some gender-affirming care for the transgender children of service members.
In his speech Sunday, Trump made expansive promises for his second term — and drew a dark picture of the four years preceding it, under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the latter of whom he defeated in the 2024 election.
“On January 20, the United States will turn the page forever on four long, horrible years of failure, incompetence, national decline, and we will inaugurate a new era of peace, prosperity and national greatness,” Trump said, referring to his swearing-in.
“I will end the war in Ukraine. I will stop the chaos in the Middle East, and I will prevent, I promise, World War III.”
The president-elect has yet to explain publicly how he plans to bring a quick end to the war in Ukraine, or to bring peace to the Middle East.
The president-elect, renewed his vow to immediately begin “the largest deportation operation in American history” upon taking office, and later went further, saying he would “immediately designate the (drug) cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.”
“This criminal network operating on American soil will be dismantled, deported and destroyed,” Trump said.
During his first term in 2019, after the killing in Mexico of nine American citizens from a Mormon community, Trump vowed to apply the terrorist designation to Mexican cartels.
But he relented following a plea from then-Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
