Former President Donald Trump has a mixed record on LGBTQ+ issues. Recently, however, observers say the GOP frontrunner has adopted a more openly anti-transgender stance. This shift coincides with a larger conservative pushback against transgender interests by Republican politicians and legislatures across the country.
Straight Arrow News contributor Jordan Reid concludes that Donald Trump will take whichever position on LGBTQ+ issues best suits his PR efforts and his public campaign image at the time. And given how poorly the new year has started off for LGBTQ+ rights, Reid argues, Americans should be concerned about how a future President Trump might curtail the freedoms of LGBTQ+ individuals.
In the last few months, we’ve seen the Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida try to rid public schools of books that acknowledge LGBTQ realities. Missouri has passed laws limiting gender-affirming care. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has declared his intention to investigate trans children’s parents. And, of course, there’s the grand old fascist himself, Donald Trump, who recently declared that, if elected, he would nationalize Abbott’s efforts, thereby ensuring that millions of people around the country have their private lives become national business and are subject to ignorance at best and large-scale violence at worst.
What’s fascinating, or, I mean, not really, because Trump isn’t especially known for keeping his stories consistent, but still, is that Trump used to be nominally at least this like ultra-watered-down sort of ally of the LGBTQ community. I mean, he congratulated Elton John on his wedding. That’s something. In 2016, he didn’t seem as devoted to a stance on the topic, stating that he was, quote, fine with it. And as recently as 2019, his spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway claimed that he approved of same sex marriage. There was even a Trump pride page on his 2020 campaign website.
My opinion? He’s cool with gay people, so long as they present an opportunity for positive PR. But he’s never actually cared about the gay community one way or the other. And so he just sort of swung from one camp to the other based mostly on who he was standing in front of. Basically, gay rights were never a hill he was planning to die on in either direction, until he saw how high that hill might be able to take him, how energized the far right was by anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.
