Trump’s Vulgar Blast Targets Pediatrician Candidate

Donald Trump speaking at a rally podium with arms raised — Photo: mark reinstein / Shutterstock

President Trump stood on a South Carolina stage and demanded a sitting pediatrician lose her medical license, after calling her a vulgar anti-transgender slur in front of a cheering crowd.

Quick Take

President Trump called Senate candidate Annie Andrews “tranny Annie Andrews” at a Clemson-area rally and accused her of child abuse.
Andrews, a practicing pediatrician, says she opposes gender surgery for minors and has never performed it.
Independent fact-checking found Andrews does support some non-surgical gender-affirming care, like puberty blockers and hormones, under certain conditions.
Andrews is challenging Republican Senator Darline Graham in a tightening South Carolina Senate race.

What Trump Said On Stage In Pendleton

President Trump used the slur to attack Andrews during a midterm rally at Clemson’s T. Ed Garrison Arena, where he campaigned for Senator Darline Graham. He called Andrews a “radical left lunatic” and the “most extreme” candidate in the race, tying his attack directly to her record on gender-affirming care for minors. He went further that night, calling for state officials to pull her medical license over claims she supported harmful treatments for children.

This was not a one-time outburst. President Trump had already used the same slur to describe Andrews days earlier, deriding her support for gender-affirming care in general terms without distinguishing between treatment types. Repeating the attack on a bigger stage, with a specific demand for license revocation attached, turned a campaign insult into a direct challenge against her professional standing.

What Andrews Actually Says She Supports

Andrews has been consistent and public about where she draws the line. She says flatly that she does not support gender-affirming surgery for anyone under 18, and that her hospital does not perform those procedures either. What she backs instead, she says, is evidence-based medical care delivered only with parental consent for teens struggling with gender identity, a standard she has defended in campaign ads and interviews for weeks.

That distinction matters because it is also where the record gets more complicated for Andrews. She has previously spoken favorably about puberty blockers and hormone therapy for a subset of transgender youth, framing it as treatment given only after extensive consultation with pediatricians, endocrinologists, and mental health providers. She has also opposed state legislation that would have banned those same treatments outright for minors.

How The Independent Fact-Check Breaks Down The Claims

CNN examined the Republican ad campaign built around Andrews and found it blurred two very different things: her opposition to gender surgery for minors, which she has stated repeatedly and clearly, and her support for non-surgical hormonal treatments, which she has also stated repeatedly and clearly. The ad, CNN reported, offered no actual evidence that Andrews supports gender surgery for minors in particular. That is a meaningful gap for voters trying to sort rhetoric from record.

Conservative voters have every right to be uneasy about hormone and puberty-blocker treatments for minors, a policy debate playing out in statehouses nationwide with real medical and ethical stakes. But collapsing “opposes surgery, supports some hormonal care” into “child abuser who performs surgery on kids” is not a fair reading of Andrews’ own public statements. The attack line works as a slogan. It does not hold up as an accurate description of her position.

Why The License Revocation Demand Raises Its Own Questions

Medical licensing in America runs through state boards, not presidents or political rallies. Courts have long affirmed that states, through these boards, hold the authority to regulate who practices medicine and under what conditions, a principle dating back over a century. A campaign demand for license revocation carries no legal weight on its own; it is a political statement, not a regulatory action, however forcefully delivered.

Andrews responded to the broader pattern of attacks by noting she never expected her own congressional district’s representative, or now a sitting president, to accuse a pediatrician of over a decade of child abuse over a medical debate with legitimate disagreement on both sides. Roughly half of transgender teens nationwide now live in states that have restricted youth gender care in some form, showing this fight extends well beyond one South Carolina race.