Anderson Cooper speaks to Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, while moderating a CNN Town Hall at Sun Center studios in Aston, Pa., Oct. 23, 2024. Former President Donald Trump has spent the past several days calling the CNN host Anderson Cooper by a woman’s name, as he devotes much of the final stretch of a close presidential campaign to increasingly unfiltered displays of grievance and bigotry. (Erin Schaff/The New York Times)
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Former President Donald Trump has spent the past several days calling CNN host Anderson Cooper by a woman’s name, as he devotes much of the final stretch of a close presidential campaign to increasingly unfiltered displays of grievance and bigotry.
On at least three occasions since Friday, twice at rallies and once on his social media platform, Trump has referred to Cooper as “Allison Cooper.” During a rally in Michigan, he added mockingly: “Oh, she said no, his name is Anderson. Oh no.”
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Trump routinely refers to people he doesn’t like by disparaging nicknames, but his references to Cooper seemed intended specifically to disparage Cooper’s sexuality in a campaign in which the former president, his campaign and allied groups have spent tens of millions of dollars on anti-transgender ads.
Cooper is gay; he is not transgender. But anti-transgender messaging — which has increasingly animated Republicans and conservative activists over the past few years, particularly in relation to gender-affirming care for transgender teenagers and to trans girls’ and women’s participation in sports — has often extended to LGBTQ+ people generally.
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Among other things, Republicans have backed state laws forbidding teachers to discuss sexual orientation or gender identity in classrooms, and sought to restrict the availability of books that focus on LGBTQ+ people.
Under the Trump administration, the Justice Department intervened in a private employment lawsuit, arguing that a major federal civil rights law did not protect employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation. (The Supreme Court rejected that argument in 2020.) The Trump administration also weakened anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people in other areas, and Trump has proposed an array of anti-transgender policies if he is elected again.
CNN’s press office said Cooper had no comment.
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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
By Maggie Astor/Erin Schaff
c. 2024 The New York Times Company
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