Leaders of the federal court system and some members of Congress are trying to limit the practice of judge shopping — when a person or group files a lawsuit in a carefully chosen court where they believe the judge will be inclined to rule in their favor.

But none of the proposed changes seem within reach.

A Democratic bill introduced this spring would require cases to be randomly assigned among all judges within a federal court district, even if the suit is filed in a courthouse that has only one judge. A Republican bill would limit when judges can block policies nationwide. Guidance issued in March by the policymaking body that oversees the courts said cases with statewide or nationwide implications should be assigned randomly.

Neither the Democratic nor Republican legislation seems likely to advance in a polarized Congress, however. And the policymaking body’s guidance was greeted with hostility in court chambers, with chief judges saying it is up to them to decide case-assignment procedures.

In the meantime, conservative judges who appear to have been intentionally chosen by plaintiffs continue to act in high-profile cases, blocking Biden administration rules to protect transgender students and to require background checks for gun-show purchases, among other decisions. Liberal judges who seemed to have been targeted by Democratic attorneys general did some of the same during the Trump administration, including on immigration policy.

“Any practice that allows litigants to manipulate the court in a way that makes the court look like they are simply doing the bidding of one side of the ideological spectrum — that’s just not something the court should abide,” said Steve Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center who has written extensively about the issue.

He and other legal experts said chief judges must work to ensure that the public trust the courts to be fair and neutral. A few judicial districts have taken steps to address the issue in their own way, eliminating single-judge divisions or creating new rules for some cases.

“This is going to play out probably fairly messily,” said Russell Wheeler of the Brookings Institution. “And you’re gonna see, as you see in a lot of other things, there’s just great variation in the federal courts.”

The history of judge shopping

Judge shopping drew national attention in 2021 because of the large concentration of patent cases — nearly a quarter — being filed in the Waco federal courthouse in the Western District of Texas, where Alan Albright is the sole judge.

Patent plaintiffs found a number of Albright’s policies attractive, including his accelerated trial schedule and decision to rarely transfer cases outside the district, according to a 2020 patent litigation study.

In 2021, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and then-senator Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asking for reforms. Weeks later, Roberts, who oversees the Judicial Conference, called for the study of judicial assignment practices in patent cases.

After the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022, an antiabortion group chose a rural Texas courthouse to challenge the federal government’s approval of a key abortion drug. The only judge in that courthouse, Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, is known for his long-held antiabortion beliefs.

Republican officials and conservative groups have also used single-judge divisions — which contain just one courthouse and only one active federal judge — to challenge Biden administration policies on LGBTQ+ rights, immigration and gun control, among other hot-button issues.

At the same time, federal judges in Alabama found that attorneys at major LGBTQ+ rights groups and law firms, including the American Civil Liberties Union, engaged in judge shopping when challenging the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors, according to a report unsealed in March.

The lawyers filed lawsuits in the Northern and Middle districts of Alabama in 2022, then voluntarily dismissed their cases when they were not assigned to a judge they thought would be sympathetic. The lawyers “purposefully attempted to circumvent the random case assignment procedures,” the report said.

In an address to the Midland County Bar Association, Judge James C. Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, said liberal and conservative litigants alike use judge shopping to “zealously advocate for their clients.”

“Let’s not pretend that strategic thinking about venue selection is the exclusive province of one type of litigant or one end of the political spectrum,” Ho said. “It happens regardless of who controls the government — or who controls the lawsuit.”

But Vladeck said the practice is far more common among conservative activists and officials, in part because single-judge courthouses are overwhelmingly located in sparsely populated parts of red states whose judicial appointees are more conservative.

Vladeck has tracked at least 46 Texas lawsuits challenging Biden administration policies in the state’s district courts. All were filed in courthouses where there is a 95 percent chance or greater of drawing a Republican appointee. Half were filed in courthouses where the challengers were guaranteed to get their case before a particular judge.

Proposals to address judge shopping

In March, the Judicial Conference asked courts to randomly assign cases that have statewide or nationwide implications throughout an entire judicial district, instead of within a smaller division or courthouse.

“Public confidence in the case assignment process requires transparency,” the body’s Court Administration and Case Management Committee wrote, suggesting that each federal district post their case assignment rules on their websites and “avoid case assignment practices that result in the likelihood that a case will be assigned to a particular judge” unless there is a reason for a case to be heard in a specific location.

But the conference’s random case assignment policy is nonbinding. The group would have to use its formal rulemaking process to create binding case assignment practices for all courts, experts said. Otherwise, authority rests with the judges of each district, according to federal statute.

Once that reality became clear, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) — along with more than three dozen other Democrats — introduced legislation that would codify the conference’s random case assignment policy into law.

“The American people need to believe in the fairness of our judicial branch, and this legislation would move our legal system in the right direction,” Schumer said in April. “We can’t let unelected judges thrash our democracy.”

That same day, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) introduced a bill that would limit the authority of district courts to provide injunctive relief only to the parties involved in a particular lawsuit, or others who are “similarly situated” and located in the same judicial district. The bill would also sanction lawyers accused of judge shopping and set new limits on where patent and bankruptcy cases can be filed.

Neither bill has advanced.

Several federal judges were unwilling to answer questions about judge shopping, with one saying the issue has become “highly politicized.” Those who did speak expressed concerns about the legislation and how the random case assignment policy would impact their work — especially in a large state like Texas, where courthouses are far apart and judges would have to travel to the courthouse where a lawsuit was filed if that case was randomly assigned to them.

“Mandating something like this that would require judges to travel 500 miles or 400 miles to a different duty station and listen to a month-long or two-month-long trial is just not how we manage our docket or our taxpayer expenses,” said Chief Judge Randy Crane of the Southern District of Texas, which has one single-judge courthouse — in Galveston — and decided in May not to adopt the guidance on random case assignments.

“I believe our court runs efficiently as is,” Crane said. “I don’t think that that policy would make us more efficient.”

He separately expressed concerns about McConnell’s bill to limit the authority of judges to issue nationwide injunctions, saying it would seriously affect how judges handle more mundane cases as well as high-profile ones.

“Everybody’s kind of focused on these cases dealing with immigration and abortion,” Crane said. “It seems as though maybe these bills are well-intentioned, but there’s not a real, full understanding of the complete consequences of their effects on regular, typical litigation in the federal courts.”

Retired Texas federal judge W. Royal Furgeson Jr. said random case assignment would also be very challenging in the Northern and Western districts of Texas. “It’s easy to say, ‘Yes, let’s just have all these judges moving around, week by week, from Dallas to San Angelo and from Waco to El Paso and so forth,’” he said. “But on the ground, not impossible, but it’s incredibly disruptive.”

In the Northern District, Kacsmaryk, Reed O’Connor and Wes Hendrix are the only judges in their divisions. Kacsmaryk suspended the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, blocked the Biden administration from ending the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” program and struck down two Biden administration protections for transgender people. The mifepristone decision was overturned on appeal.

Making their own changes

Current and retired federal judges say they know their districts best and that the judiciary will sort itself out. This happened in the Southern District of Texas, the Western District of Texas and the Western District of Louisiana.

There used to be two single-judge divisions in the Southern District of Texas. In Victoria, Tex., U.S. District Judge Drew B. Tipton received all civil and criminal cases, including several high-stakes immigration cases. Like Kacsmaryk’s, Tipton’s rulings have been wins for the right.

But in 2023, Tipton was transferred to the Houston Division and two judges in Corpus Christi picked up his Victoria cases. While Crane, the chief judge, said the transfer was not in response to judge-shopping complaints, the move ended one of the most significant hubs for the practice in the state.

In Galveston, the other single-judge division in the district, Judge Jeffrey V. Brown acknowledged in a statement that “judge-shopping is an issue of concern.” His chambers said he issued an order in December that plaintiffs must explain their case’s connection to Galveston if there is no obvious “factual nexus.” The court will then decide if the case should be transferred elsewhere.

Crane said there has been no case filed in Galveston seeking nationwide relief on any issue since Brown put the new procedure in place.

In the Western District of Texas, the number of patent cases declined by about 41 percent in 2023 after the chief judge directed them to be randomly assigned — a response to Roberts’s concerns.

In Louisiana, Terry A. Doughty used to be the only judge in his courthouse in Monroe. In 2023, two other judges started taking some cases filed there following concerns about judge shopping, though Doughty — the chief judge of the Western District — still handles about 70 percent.

Judges in the district decided not to adopt the random case assignment policy because each division now has more than one judge, Doughty said. In 2023, he blocked the federal government from communicating with social media companies — a decision rejected by the Supreme Court this summer on procedural grounds.

In the Lake Charles Division of the district, Judge James D. Cain Jr. hears 90 percent of civil cases filed, while Judge David C. Joseph only hears 10 percent. A Trump appointee with a history of upending Biden’s climate goals, Cain in July blocked the administration’s pause on approving new facilities that export liquefied natural gas.

The government had asked Cain to dismiss the case for lack of jurisdiction.

Vice President Kamala Harris has accepted CNN’s invitation for an Oct. 23 presidential debate, with her campaign calling on former president Donald Trump to do the same.

“Donald Trump should have no problem agreeing to this debate,” Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said Saturday in a statement. “It is the same format and setup as the CNN debate he attended and said he won in June, when he praised CNN’s moderators, rules, and ratings.”

Trump, who debated Harris on Sept. 10, has so far said he is not interested in another debate.

Trump has claimed he won the debate against Harris, though most polls show the vice president as the victor. Harris has been saying on the campaign trail that her standoff with Trump was “fun” and that he owed it to the public to face her onstage again.

“It would be unprecedented in modern history for there to just be one general election debate,” O’Malley Dillon said. “Debates offer a unique chance for voters to see the candidates side by side and take stock of their competing visions for America.”

CNN said the debate would follow the format of the June 27 faceoff between President Joe Biden and Trump, taking place at the company’s Atlanta studios and without a live audience.

Harris’s campaign, which originally sought to change the rules that had been sought by allies of Biden before he ended his presidential bid, said it would accept muted microphones and other restrictions during a CNN debate.

Biden’s halting performance during that debate ultimately led to his decision to end his candidacy. Trump praised CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, who did not fact-check him during the debate.

The former president has complained about ABC’s moderators, who called out some of his falsehoods during the Sept. 10 debate with Harris.

“Both Vice President Harris and former President Trump received an invitation to participate in a CNN debate this fall as we believe the American people would benefit from a second debate between the two candidates for President of the United States,” CNN said in a statement. “We look forward to receiving a response from both campaigns so the American public can hear more from these candidates as they make their final decision.”

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to The Post for a request for comment.

Trump has vacillated between expressing openness to another debate and asserting that he would not participate in one.

“THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!” he posted on his Truth Social platform earlier this month.

Former president Barack Obama headlined his first solo fundraiser for Kamala Harris in Los Angeles on Friday night, bringing in $4 million for her campaign as he framed the election as a struggle against radical forces in America that want to take the country backward.

The event was part of the increasingly active role that Obama is playing in Harris’s effort as he wields his popularity within the Democratic Party to power grassroots fundraising and to galvanize younger voters to turn out in what could be a margin-of-error race.

The Harris campaign recently featured clips from his Democratic National Convention speech mocking Donald Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes” in one of its ads to needle the Republican nominee just before his debate with Harris.

So far this presidential campaign cycle, the events where Obama has been featured and the grassroots fundraising appeals that he has signed have generated at least $76 million, according to his office.

In the short time that she has been in the presidential race, Harris has opened a wide cash advantage over Trump. Friday night, reports filed with the Federal Election Commission showed that she raised more than four times as much as Trump did in August.

The private event Friday night was held at the Los Angeles home of James Costos, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Spain and Andorra under Obama, and his partner, Michael S. Smith, who was White House decorator when Obama was president.

Before a gathering of more than 65 people, Obama argued that the nation and the world are at “a crossroads” where demographic changes, globalization and the information revolution have “disrupted the old order” and made “us vulnerable to the appeals of fear and anger and tribe,” according to excerpts of his remarks provided by his office.

Obama described Harris’s campaign as an effort to guard against those destructive forces and usher in a future that would create an economy “where everybody has enough” and Americans don’t see the changes occurring in society as a zero-sum game where “if somebody gains, somebody must lose.”

“That’s what my election was about back in 2008 … and we’ve now gone through 16 years of continuing struggle to move in a direction in which it’s not radical,” Obama said.

He told attendees that Harris, who has been a friend for two decades, “can make us proud on the world stage about what America stands for, as opposed to embarrassing us.”

“We’re still going to have free markets and we’re still going to have our liberties, and Americans are still going to be doing the weird things that we do. But we can make sure that it’s a little bit gentler, a little bit kinder, a little bit more generous, a little bit less unequal, a little bit more inclusive.”

Obama and Harris met when he was running for Senate in Illinois. She became one of the earliest supporters of his 2008 bid for president — traveling to Iowa to knock doors for him at a moment when many of the Democratic Party’s power brokers had lined up behind Hillary Clinton.

Obama served as a sounding board for Harris when she became vice president. He also actively raised money for President Joe Biden, his former vice president, when he was still in the race. That included a star-studded Los Angeles fundraiser with George Clooney and Julia Roberts in June and a New York fundraiser with Biden and former president Bill Clinton in March.

After Biden’s faltering debate performance against Trump, Obama told allies that Biden’s path to victory had diminished and that he needed to seriously consider the viability of his candidacy — creating some resentment among Biden loyalists.

Harris and Obama have been in especially close touch over the past two months as she was elevated to the top of the ticket after Biden withdrew from the race. The former president has offered to help with strategic advice, fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts, including a major push with creators on social media this week for National Voter Registration Day. Several of the top advisers on his presidential campaigns are now involved with Harris’s campaign.

Both leaders have faced similar attacks from Trump and the conservative right on their mixed-race heritage. For years, Trump falsely claimed that Obama wasn’t born in the United States as he questioned the former president’s qualifications for the office.

After Harris became Biden’s running mate in 2020, Trump tried similar tactics by falsely claiming that there were questions about her eligibility as she was poised to become the first Black and Asian American vice president.

When Trump baselessly questioned the racial identity of Harris — the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father — during a forum hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists, Harris rebuffed his assertion that she “happened to turn Black” by alluding to his many years perpetuating the “birther” movement’s lies about Obama. “Same old tired playbook,” she said during a CNN interview. “Next question, please.”

Attendees of Obama’s fundraiser for Harris in Los Angeles included Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos and his wife, Nicole Avant, a producer and author who served as the U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas during Obama’s administration. Others who attended included actress Jennifer Coolidge and comedian Conan O’Brien.

The former president said Friday that he wished he had a four- or five-point plan to win the election, but “truthfully, the plan is we’re going to push through it.”

“If we win — when we win — it won’t solve all the crazy that’s out there,” he said. “But each time we win, it’s solidifying this new future. It is ushering in these new possibilities. Eventually, that will become the new normal and the new reality.”

WILMINGTON, N.C. — Donald Trump made no mention of embattled North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson at a rally here Saturday, as Republicans privately worried that the pivotal state could be slipping away amid scrutiny of old comments on a porn site made by a user linked to Robinson.

During the former president’s speech, in which he repeated false claims that all jobs are going to undocumented immigrants and that Democrats “cheated” in the 2020 election, the former president stressed the importance of the Tar Heel State in his path to re-claiming the Oval Office. He touted his daughter-in-law’s ties to the state and said Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley would be “looking for a job” if they lost North Carolina.

“We’re counting on this guy,” he said of Whatley, who was the state party chair in 2020. “Michael, you better win or you’re never going to be able to come back here.”

Trump added: “I think he’s going to win.”

Trump’s visit to Wilmington comes as he and Harris are tied in the state, according to The Washington Post’s polling average, where Democrats haven’t won a presidential election since Barack Obama in 2008. A Trump campaign official told reporters at a briefing last month that as long as Trump wins North Carolina, he just needs to win Georgia and Pennsylvania out of the other six swing states to win the White House.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, meanwhile, is seeking to tie Trump to Robinson, and released an ad featuring clips of Trump praising Robinson as “an unbelievable lieutenant governor” and “better than Martin Luther King.” The ad also includes a clip of Robinson saying “there’s no compromise on abortion.” Trump endorsed Robinson earlier this year.

Some Republicans fear the controversy surrounding Robinson could be a drag on the presidential race, as well as down-ballot races.

The state “is trending away from [Trump] but there is time to fix it,” a North Carolina Republican said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the race candidly. “A lot depends on how the campaign responds to the new Harris ad. Linking Trump and Robinson is going to hurt with suburban women.”

Robinson’s gubernatorial campaign was upended Thursday after CNN reported a porn site user linked to Robinson declared himself a “black Nazi,” among other racist and lewd comments. That same user, under the name “minisoldr,” also praised Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” Robinson denied writing the posts. But CNN found many links between Robinson and minisoldr, which matches Robinson’s username on public accounts and lists the user’s full name as “mark robinson.”

In a post on X, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) on Friday acknowledged the potential political damage of the Robinson allegations.

“If the reporting on Mark Robinson is a total media fabrication, he needs to take immediate legal action,” Tillis said. “If the reporting is true, he owes it to President Trump and every Republican to take accountability for his actions and put the future of NC & our party before himself.”

State GOP leaders continue to officially back Robinson, and Robinson and his allies are betting that many Republican voters are willing to brush aside even the most damaging allegations as “fake news.”

Still, some Republicans are worried. Senior state legislative leaders believed the news was likely to cost them their supermajority in the General Assembly and were continuing to pressure Robinson to drop from the race, the North Carolina Republican source said.

Trump won his narrowest victory in North Carolina in 2020, topping Biden by just 1.3 percentage points after beating Hillary Clinton by 3.6 percentage points four years earlier. Trump didn’t clear 50 percent in either year. Some Republicans in the state want Trump to distance himself from Robinson’s actions and want him to find a resonant issue to counter the appeal of Harris’s defense of abortion rights. Economic issues may also become less potent for Republicans in part because of rapidly declining gas prices.

Harris’s campaign is far better organized in North Carolina than President Joe Biden’s was four years ago, mostly because the Democrats ran virtually no door-to-door operation during the covid pandemic. This year’s organizing effort could lead to better Democratic turnout.

While Trump hasn’t addressed the Robinson allegations, his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), bashed the media while speaking at an event in Pennsylvania for focusing on “salacious scandals in other states,” rather than “the fact that Donald Trump was nearly assassinated.” Vance will be in Charlotte on Monday for campaign events.

At Trump’s rally Saturday, it was clear that many in the GOP base were ready to discredit and look past almost any allegation, dismissing unflattering stories as a media smear job. Standing in line for the Italian sausage stand, Ken Webb said he would vote for Robinson despite this week’s scandal.

“Who knows what’s true or not?” he said. “The media twists and they turn things around on everyone.”

A reporter noted that the porn site user linked to Robinson also described an affair with his wife’s sister and praised “Mein Kampf” as a “good read.” Asked if that concerned him, Webb said the most important thing was defeating Democrats. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein’s support for abortion rights was a dealbreaker, Webb said.

“As a Christian, abortion is not an option for me,” he added.

During his speech, Trump briefly touched on abortion, as he spoke about female voters in broad terms, at one point remarking that “women have been through a lot.” Under a second Trump administration, “You will no longer be thinking about abortion because it is now where it always had to be, with the states,” he told the crowd. Trump also made several baseless and hyperbolic claims, saying if Harris wins, “Israel will be gone and you won’t have autoworkers.” And he used dehumanizing language to talk about migrants, saying this “invasion is destroying the fabric of our country.”

Democrats were jubilant Friday at a state lawmaker’s “Bourbon and Bowties” fundraiser in Durham, attended by Gov. Roy Cooper (D) and Stein, running to succeed him. Over drinks on the patio, attendees chattered about the news stories surrounding Robinson and all but declared victory in the governor’s race.

“I have not followed the news at all,” Stein said a couple minutes into his speech. “Did anything happen, in the last few days, that I need to know about?”

People cackled. “You won!” a man yelled. “You won!”

“Lord help us all,” Stein said, the audience still laughing.

But later he got serious.

“The vision of our opponent in this race, the lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, is one of division, violence and hate,” Stein said. He ticked through Robinson’s “culture war” fights, his anti-gay comments and his declaration at a church that “we are called to be led by men” rather than women.

The crowd was no longer laughing.

Meryl Kornfield contributed to this report

Penny Nance slid a form across the table to Donald Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. Her Christian nonprofit, Concerned Women for America, wanted Trump to pledge in writing that a person’s “gender identity” doesn’t “overrule their sex,” and that if he becomes president again, “all federal agencies will be directed to uphold this fact in every policy and program at home and abroad.”

Such a promise would have wide-ranging implications, the form emphasized, affecting schools, prisons, shelters, health care providers, the military and more. But it was an easy sell, Nance recalled of her June 2023 conversation, and Trump soon signed the pledge. On the trail a few days later Trump marveled aloud at the crowd’s standing ovation for his promise to crack down on “transgender insanity.”

“It’s amazing how strongly people feel about that. You see, I’m talking about cutting taxes, people go like that,” he said, mimicking a polite, reserved clap. “I talk about transgender, everyone goes crazy,” he added. “Who would have thought?”

The former president, who has shifted his position over the years on LGBTQ issues, is planning to lead the GOP charge on gender identity if he returns to the White House, according to his campaign and interviews with allies, testing the legal limits of federal action as the Supreme Court also takes up the issue. He says he wants to kick providers out of Medicare and Medicaid for offering gender transition care to minors such as hormone therapy and surgery; pull federal funding from schools if officials suggest a child “could be trapped in the wrong body”; and purge anything in the federal government deemed to promote transgender identity. The moves would go against the advice of leading medical groups.

He has said far less about gay rights, an issue where he is sometimes out of step with his most conservative Christian supporters. His wife, Melania Trump, has hosted fundraisers for an LGBTQ Republican group in recent months. And over the summer, Trump backed an overhaul of the Republican Party platform that removed long-standing opposition to the Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage.

But the first Trump administration fought efforts to extend anti-discrimination laws to cover sexual orientation, and social conservatives are eager for Trump to pick up where he left off. Trump is also expected to try to appoint more conservative judges on the federal bench who could influence future landmark decisions on LGBTQ issues.

Civil rights groups are already raising alarms and preparing to challenge Trump’s agenda in court. A detailed memo the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released in June argues many of Trump’s proposals are illegal or unconstitutional. The group’s lawyers see many opportunities to push back but also say it’s hard to predict how courts might rule, especially after the former president’s success pushing the federal judiciary to the right.

“I think a lot of folks feel if they live in a so-called blue state, they’re safe from whatever impact a second Trump administration can have, and that’s just not true,” said Leslie Cooper, deputy director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project. The Trump team, she said, is “saying what they would try to do.” She added: “I think we should believe them that they mean it.”

A second Trump term would be a sharp turn away from the Biden administration, which rolled back many Trump-era policies — including Trump’s ban on transgender people serving openly in the military — and is battling in court to require federally funded schools to accommodate transgender students. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has also promoted LBGTQ rights as Republican-led states pass laws restricting gender transition care and discussion of LGBTQ issues in schools.

The emerging second-term plans underscore a shift in the politics of LGBTQ issues since 2016, when Trump suggested that North Carolina’s restrictions on transgender people’s restroom use were unnecessary and said the trans celebrity Caitlyn Jenner could use any toilet she wanted at Trump Tower. Republicans who were on the defensive for years on same-sex marriage have turned much of their focus to gender transition and found public support for some restrictions.

Polls show Americans support same-sex marriage by big margins, and a Washington Post-KFF poll last year found that large majorities support laws prohibiting discrimination against transgender people in workplaces, education, the military and other settings.

At the same time, the polls found that about two-thirds of Americans said trans women and girls should not be allowed to play in women’s sports, and solid majorities opposed allowing trans youth to use puberty blockers and hormonal treatments.

Asked how Trump’s administration would approach LGBTQ issues if reelected, Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that Trump’s “second term agenda will create a safer and more prosperous America for ALL Americans, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or creed!”

Trump regularly portrays transgender people as a threat to women in his campaign speeches, mocking their participation in women’s sports before laughing crowds. Last month at a Washington, D.C., summit for the activist group Moms for Liberty, Trump misrepresented the process of gender transition for minors, falsely suggesting schools rather than parents consent to a child’s medical “operation.”

Asked what he could do as president to address the rising number of children identifying as transgender, Trump said: “Well, you can do everything. President has such power.”

Targeting gender transition care

Trump’s plans, if successful, would have enormous impact. Pulling Medicare and Medicaid eligibility for health care providers that offer gender transition care to youth could effectively halt most of that treatment across the country, experts said, building on laws restricting the procedures for minors in more than 20 states.

The Supreme Court said in June that it would review one such law in Tennessee, which would mark the justices’ first chance to weigh whether the restrictions are constitutional.

Ben Carson, who served as Housing Secretary under Trump, said in an interview that he and Trump have talked about what they see as the problem of gender transition care for minors.

“Asking them to make profound decisions that will affect the rest of their lives — those are not reasonable things to do,” he said, referring to treatments that can include hormone therapy and surgery.

Advocates for LGBTQ rights say denying those options is cruel, and note that major medical organizations support the procedures. Some are urging state officials to set aside their own funding for gender-affirming care to blunt potential loss of access under a Trump administration.

“Politicians should prioritize getting the country back on track, not making life more difficult for trans Americans,” said Ash Orr, a spokesperson for the National Center for Transgender Equality. This election, Orr added, will be critical for the trans community.

Some of Trump’s proposals on gender identity — such as a bill banning practices he refers to as “child sexual mutilation” — would require a supportive Congress. Many others would rely on executive action. For example, Trump has promised to reinstate his first administration’s ban on transgender people serving openly in the military.

A quieter fight over gay rights

Trump’s “Agenda 47” videos, which promote his policy plans, dwell on trans issues at length without discussing sexual orientation. But civil rights groups say they anticipate a second Trump term would be consequential for gay rights, as well.

In Trump’s first term, multiple federal agencies quietly removed references to sexual orientation from anti-discrimination guidelines, and the administration argued in court against interpreting discrimination law to cover sexual orientation.

In the summer of 2020, Trump appeared to publicly accept a 6-3 Supreme Court ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, written by Trump appointee Neil M. Gorsuch, that concluded a federal ban on sex discrimination in employment extends to bias against gay and transgender people. “They’ve ruled, and we live with the decision,” Trump said.

But Trump’s Department of Justice suggested a narrow interpretation of the high court’s ruling, emphasizing potential exceptions for religious views and First Amendment rights and saying in a memo the justices’ interpretation did not necessarily translate to areas besides employment.

Groups such as the ACLU argue that Bostock’s reasoning should apply broadly, and some courts have agreed. But there is pushback. “The debate between conservative constitutionalists and the Biden administration is how Bostock is applied, and the Biden administration has taken Bostock and applied it to everything they could get their hands on,” said Roger Severino, who led the Office of Civil Rights in the Health and Human Services Department under Trump.

More recently, Severino wrote a chapter on health policy for a book published by Project 2025, a conservative effort outside the Trump campaign to recommend personnel and policies for the next administration. (Trump criticized Project 2025 over the summer as Democrats increasingly attacked it.) Severino argues for reversing the Biden administration’s assertion that the Affordable Care Act bans federally-supported health programs from discriminating based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Some prominent social conservative allies of Trump concede the tides have turned against them on same-sex marriage, which once dominated the political fight over LGBTQ rights. “I don’t know that there’s a policy opportunity on that issue, on marriage,” said Nance of Concerned Women for America, which prominently states on its website that marriage is “between a man and a woman.”

Trump criticized the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide during the GOP primary in 2016, then said shortly after winning the election that he was “fine” with it.

Still, the 2022 Supreme Court ruling striking down the long-standing right to abortion — and conservative Justice Clarence Thomas’s suggestion at the same time that gay rights cases need reexamining — has made the LGBTQ community nervous that other precedents could fall, especially if Trump makes more judicial appointments.

Charles Moran, the president of the Log Cabin Republicans — a group for LGBTQ conservatives and their allies — said Trump has been supportive, praised his first administration’s efforts to decriminalize homosexuality internationally and noted that Trump had the first Pride Coalition in GOP presidential campaign history.

But other Trump supporters have resisted the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage. Severino’s chapter in the Project 2025 policy book encourages the next Health and Human Services secretary to endorse the idea that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure.” Asked about that idea, Moran echoed Trump and his advisers’ distancing from Project 2025.

“Kids sometimes write letters to Santa Claus with their wish list of things that they’d like,” Moran said. Some adults “do exactly the same thing,” he added.