Brooks: Attacks from Trump’s White House spark fear and resolve in the ‘trans refuge’ state of Minnesota

It’s a scary thing to be targeted by your own government.

That was probably the point of the executive orders pouring out of the White House in the first days of the second Trump administration. Orders targeting government employees. Orders targeting institutions that place any value on diversity, equity or inclusion. Orders targeting newborn babies. Orders targeting transgender Americans like Minnesota state Rep. Leigh Finke.

“They want trans people scared,” said Finke, a Democrat who represents St. Paul in the Minnesota House. Or rather, she would be representing St. Paul if the 2025 legislative session weren’t a complete trainwreck.

President Donald Trump spent his first hours back in power on spiteful things. He pardoned the 1,500 Capitol rioters who broke laws and carried out violence in his name. He took down the Spanish-language portal on the White House website and replaced it with an ominous message in all caps: GO HOME.

He dismantled a Biden-era program aimed at lowering the price of prescriptions for Medicare and Medicaid patients. He waged war on windmills. He fired people with nasty social media posts — including people who had already quit, like Chef José Andrés. He declared himself the lone arbiter of sex, gender, bathrooms and school sports.

It was a lot. It was too much — designed to stun Americans into giving up and going along, to get us to police the public potties whether it’s constitutional or not.

“It’s one of the tools of fascism to get people to comply in advance. You get people to turn on each other,” said Finke, the first openly transgender lawmaker elected to the Minnesota House. “This is a public terrorism campaign.”

Finke authored a 2023 law that designates Minnesota as a “trans refuge” state. Entire families have moved here from at least 20 different states, in search of a home where politicians aren’t going to elbow in between them and their doctor.

Now the president of the United States is leveraging the entire weight of his office — not to bring down the cost of housing or build up America’s crumbling infrastructure — but to announce how many “sexes” he thinks there are.

Not everyone is giving up and going along. One of Minnesota’s own, Episcopal Bishop of Washington, the Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, who spent 18 years as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Minneapolis, pleaded with Trump to his face to show mercy to the people he is terrorizing.

“I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” Budde said during her sermon at the prayer service Trump attended Tuesday at Washington’s National Cathedral. “There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives.”

Trump responded by demanding an apology. Republican Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia called for Budde, a U.S. citizen born in New Jersey, to be deported.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, meanwhile, has joined the legal pushback from almost half the states in the country against Trump’s executive orders.

Trump’s rhetoric makes Finke and countless other Minnesotans a target for simply existing. What they need is a few hundred million more of us to show the courage and kindness of the Rev. Budde.

“Being a trans person is not something we can just put back in the closet for four years,” Finke said. “Stand up for the people in your lives... Don’t pre-comply with the erasure of trans people.”