a trans woman asked florida's would-be governor about the epstein files. he went with "sir." then he went with it again.

Byron Donalds at AmericaFest 2025. Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via The Advocate, and the video of the exchange

The question was about the Epstein files. That part keeps falling off the clip.

A transgender woman stopped Byron Donalds, the Republican running for governor of Florida, during his statewide bus tour, The Advocate reports. On the video, she tells him she had received his campaign mailer and was upset by it as a member of the LGBTQ community. "There is no trans agenda," she says. She is trans, she tells him, and "I don't have any agenda." Then she pivots to the agenda she says she does see, a cover-up, and asks how he plans to protect children while being endorsed by "somebody that's covering up the Epstein files."

what donalds actually said

He starts to answer, and the first word out of him is "sir." She cuts in: she is not a sir, she is a ma'am. Donalds tells her that as a member of Congress he voted to release the files. A few seconds later he explains himself, per the Advocate: "I'm listening to the voice, and I hear a sir. I'm sorry." Then he says "sir" again anyway.

The bystanders were not having it. On the tape, someone off camera unloads a string of profanity at him, and another voice tells him he has belittled her enough on camera. She walks off. Given the afternoon she was having, that is restraint.

the part nobody is clipping

By Friday night the video had become a genre. Accounts on the right posted it as Donalds "shutting down" a trans woman, TheBlaze among them, with captions built entirely around the word "sir." The most-shared versions we read were captioned around that one word and left out that the exchange began with a mailer from his own campaign and a question about the Epstein files. The Advocate reports Donald Trump is scheduled to campaign for Donalds on Friday at Florida Gulf Coast University's Alico Arena in Fort Myers.

So here is the scorecard. He was asked about a mailer and a cover-up. He answered the cover-up with his voting record, which is fine, and answered her existence with a pronoun, which was the bit he chose to repeat. The Advocate says it asked his campaign for comment. It is, after all, mailer season. We would love to read his.

The caption on the video, the Advocate notes, describes her as a veteran. She was a constituent asking a candidate a question. That used to be the whole point of a bus tour.