How Rahm Emanuel Got Trapped in the Bathroom
In a Washington Post interview last week, Rahm Emanuel shared his diagnosis of what ailed Democrats in 2024. The former Chicago mayor and former U.S. ambassador to Japan wishes some Democrats would worry less about “a child’s right to pick his pronouns” and more about “children who do not know what a pronoun is.”
It’s a clever line: punchy, quotable, and perfectly calibrated for the anti-trans post-election Democratic circular firing squad. It’s also complete bullshit.
Here’s what actually happened in 2024: Republicans spent over $200 million on anti-trans attack ads while Democrats remained virtually silent on the issue. The Trump campaign’s “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you” ad ran unopposed as Democrats refused to defend trans people or even articulate their own position. The New York Times revealed the truth in its own recent analysis: this Democratic silence “allowed Republicans, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads attacking Democrats on transgender rights in 2024, to define voters’ perceptions of Democratic policy positions.”
So when Emanuel claims Democrats need to talk less about trans issues, one has to ask: How do you talk less than not at all?
This isn’t just about Emanuel’s mathematical impossibility. It’s about a man with a documented history of throwing vulnerable people and communities under the bus — from covering up the police murder of Laquan McDonald to closing 50 schools in Black neighborhoods—now urging Democrats to abandon yet another marginalized group. Emanuel doesn’t want Democrats to win by standing for something. He wants them to win by standing for nothing, hoping Republicans will stop hitting them if they just lie down.
The tragedy is that Democrats are already following his advice. And it’s not working.
To understand the cynicism of Emanuel’s position, you need to see what he’s actually calling for. When he says Democrats should stop talking about “bathrooms and locker rooms,” he’s not criticizing excessive rhetoric because there wasn’t any. What he’s really saying is that Democrats should stop opposing discriminatory legislation altogether.
