In my swing state of Pennsylvania, it’s common for people to joke about how exhausted they are from all the campaign ads. But this year, the jokes fail to capture the ongoing psychological damage Donald Trump and his allies provoke with their appeals loaded with lies. While advertising for Vice President Kamala Harris are mostly reassuring promises of tax cuts for the middle class, every Trump spot is ball of maximum volume. We are routinely threatened with rape and murder by roving gangs of dark-skinned immigrants. Or we’re subjected to highly distorted footage of Harris laughing like she’s a horror movie villain about to torture us in a basement. But what makes me cringe the most are the anti-trans ads.

Since all of Trump’s ads are vicious garbage, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why the hate against trans people stands out. It is the slogan: “Kamala is for them/them, Trump is for you”. Whoever wrote this no doubt thinks he’s a cute troll, but what’s striking is that he’s clearer than any other ad in his zero-sum mentality. According to these ads, one can be either trans or cis, but not both. (Never mind that Harris is a cis woman herself.) The not-so-subtle implicit message is that the mere existence of trans people threatens cis people.

To be sure, this is the central message of the Trump campaign, no matter the subject: If any two people are different—whether because of gender, sexual orientation, skin color, or background—they must be in a deadlocked struggle for dominance, and there can be only one winner. If women win, men automatically lose. If people immigrate here, it can only be to the detriment of those who live here. But it’s rarely said as bluntly as in anti-trans ads. We are told it is impossible that there is enough room for both cis and trans people in our communities.

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It is so obviously untrue given a single moment of thought. Even for those who don’t fully understand trans identities, this is a classic mind your own business. The correlation between someone else’s gender identity and chromosomal arrangement does not affect you. Efforts to make someone else’s gender identity relevant to a cis person’s life are laughable in their level of stretch. Did you hear that the 5th grade football team has a trans kid? Could the person in the stall next to you have different-looking genitalia? Have you seen pronouns on a label? How empty does your life have to be to even care? It affects you less than a moth beacon in China. It doesn’t make sense, which is why Republicans have resorted to QAnon-level lies – like Trump’s Bizare claims that children are being forced to undergo sex reassignment surgeries in the course of a school day—to fuel this nonsense.

And yet, as Melissa Gira Grant wrote in the New Republicanti-trans attacks “have become the ‘closing message’ from Trump and other Republican candidates to voters.” Anyone who lives in a cradle state can attest. While Trump at his rallies talks more about his racism, calling black immigrants “garbage” that “poisons the blood” of the nation, “they/them” ads dominate TV.

It’s terrible, but it’s also confusing. Research repeatedly shows that anti-trans messages do not move the needle, electoral. Most voters hate these ads, calling them “disgraceful” and “war”. As Dave Weigel reported in Semaphore, Republicans went all-in on anti-trans messaging in the last election, but the issue “it didn’t work before for GOP candidates in swing states.” Weigel argues that Republicans are ignoring all the data that shows this issue isn’t moving, mostly because of a gut feeling that it will resonate this time.

One certainly hopes they are wrong, and voters will continue to be perplexed as to why they are being told to be frightened by the personal affairs of strangers. But even if that strategy fails another time for Republicans, there’s every reason to be concerned about the long-term impact of covering the airwaves with such hateful rhetoric. The most immediate consequence is to further integrate this unleashed hatred towards trans people. Many people, perhaps most, are under the illusion that some mysterious “they” wouldn’t allow these ads on TV if the rhetoric were so bad. This is not true, but this false assumption allows people to see these ads and think it’s normal to be so fixated and upset about other people’s gender identities. That creates a permission structure for unstable people to wallow in their irrational hatred.

We can already see the impact of previous election cycles, where Republicans have made trans people the object of hatred for their followers. It didn’t win them more elections, but it probably did contributed to the alarming increase in hate crimesmost of it due to a dramatic increase in attacks on people perceived to be trans. In the past, a person like Chaya Raichik would be widely regarded as needing medical interventions for her all-consuming preoccupation with trans strangers. Instead, she is a thought leader in the GOPdespite the fact that constant beating of terrorism against people and the schools she is targeting for being LGBTQ-friendly. The campaign of terror is spreading internationally and against anyone the right deems to somehow not fit their narrow gender roles. The Algerian boxer of Cis Imane Khelif was submitted to an international campaign of harassment — backed by Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio — after false claims that he was a “biological male” for beating a lighter-skinned woman in an Olympic match.

Abuse and violence against trans people is reason enough to be concerned, but the attacks against Khelif illustrate how this dark cloud of hate is expanding and consuming more and more people. It all goes back to the ugly “they/them” catchphrase in Trump’s ads. Implicit in these ads is the belief that any difference between people, no matter how insignificant, creates zero-sum conflict between them, even though there is no rational reason to believe that their differences should matter. This mentality breeds paranoia, alienation and fighting between people who would otherwise be fine living peacefully as neighbors, even friends. For people who are told to hate each other for irrational reasons, nothing good comes of it – just stress and pointless anger. The only people who benefit are vile politicians like Trump who ruin lives to get votes and dance away from the social ruins the rest of us have to live in.