Trump's feeble pitch to LGBTQ voters: Think about your wallet--and stay closeted

His campaign is desperate for support but can't piss off Christian nationalists, who Trump needs to turn out in massive numbers.

Last week, The Hill published a story headlined, “Trump ignores Pride Month in favor of a broader pitch to LGBTQ voters.”

This was pretty laughable. What exactly is the “broader” pitch?

Well, we got a preview of it in April, when we heard about Melania Trump’s pathetically small gay fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago that was literally and figuratively closeted: It was held in a tiny tea room—because there were so few people—and it was shrouded in mystery, as reporters couldn’t get details. It was never quite called a “gay” or “LGBT” fundraiser.

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Trump himself didn’t attend, lest the religious zealots become furious. The words “gay” or “LGBT” never came out of Melania’s mouth at the event nor on her social media feeds, as she hosted the event for the Log Cabin Republicans—the pitiful MAGA gay group—for their campaign in the gay community to help elect Trump.

Now, according to The Hill piece:

[While] the Biden campaign has marked Pride Month with a blitz of advertisements, interviews and engagements with local LGBTQ groups and prominent figures to try and motivate voters ahead of November…the Trump campaign has done nothing specific to mark Pride Month…

…Trump and his allies are making a broader pitch that his policies on the economy and the border will benefit LGBTQ Americans, just as they would benefit other communities, even as the former president attacks transgender athletes and vows to reverse transgender student protections enacted by the Biden administration.

The Trump campaign spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, offered The Hill a statement:

By bringing down inflation and the skyrocketing cost of living, cutting taxes, and restoring law and order in our communities, President Trump’s second term agenda will create a safer and more prosperous America for ALL Americans, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or creed!

Charles Moran, president of Log Cabin, told The Hill:

The economy and malaise Joe Biden and Democrats have brought are affecting gay families as bad as Latino families, as Asian families, as everybody else in this country. So it’s not like we have to have this policy portfolio that we have to present to these different communities. Under Donald Trump, your life was better and it doesn’t matter what your skin color was, or your gender or your sexual identity.

All of this is utterly preposterous.

First off, the economy is thriving under Biden, with unemployment very low, and wages going up. And no, four years ago today we were seeing massive unemployment and thousands of our loved ones dying because of a pandemic Trump mismanaged. Inflation was caused by the pandemic supply chain shortages, and is now coming down dramatically. 

So no, life wasn’t better for anyone under Trump—except perhaps for the rich and the corporations that got huge tax cuts.

And for LGBTQ people, it was a nightmare of rolling back President Obama’s progress in banning discrimination against gay people, of seeing transgender people banned from the military, and of watching Trump stack the Supreme Court with loyalists who’d join others on the court in stripping away LGBTQ rights. Trump was the worst president in American history for LGBTQ people.

Trump and Project 2025, which he embraces, plan to go much further in stripping rights from queer people. Trump, who in 2016 told Caitlyn Jenner she could choose any bathroom she wanted, now grotesquely vilifies trans people in horrific videos, supporting bathroom bills and attacking “left-wing gender insanity.” He’s vowing to stop gender-affirming care for young people, and he’s also demonizing doctors and parents of trans people.

Trump’s MAGA warriors in Congress are now the party that overwhelmingly voted against the Respect for Marriage Act in 2022, introduced by Democrats and signed into law by President Biden after a Trump loyalist on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, suggested that Obergefell should be overturned after Roe v. Wade, which was only overturned because of Trump’s appointees on the court.

Trump’s party in the House, led by the slavishly devoted House Speaker Mike Johnson, has voted to strip funding for LGBTQ senior centers, and to end equity programs for queer people in the military, among a slew of other efforts to defund programs in LGBTQ communities.

So, the actions by Trump and the GOP past and present, and the promises they’re making to Christian nationalists now, are a five-alarm fire for LGBTQ people.

Even if you were to believe the economy isn’t great or think there are other problems, if the choice is between the fascist who will take away your rights and destroy democracy itself or the other guy, you choose the other guy.

But the Trump pitch isn’t just telling people to vote on “broader” issues than their own rights, which is crazy enough.

They’re also sending a message to stay closeted, to be quiet, and not expect visibility and recognition—because that will jeopardize Trump’s re-election, infuriating the Christian extremist base.

Republicans and Trump campaign officials told The Hill that outreach to LGBTQ voters will be “decentralized,” relying on “coalition groups” to make the case over several months rather than the campaign itself doing it during Pride month.

In other words, the campaign and Trump will not be addressing LGBTQ people. What you’re going to see is Log Cabin holding events—quiet, closeted ones like the one with Melania Trump—while these queer MAGA sell-outs try to persuade people to vote for Trump.

It seems like light years ago, but remember when Trump himself tried to woo LGBTQ voters with stunts like unfurling a rainbow flag on stage at a rally in 2016? In that campaign, he used the term “LGBT” several times and even added in the “Q” once—even while he made promises to anti-LGBTQ groups to strip queer rights. The derelict, access-driven corporate media helped in this duplicity, portraying Trump as “more accepting on gay issues” than other Republicans, as Maggie Haberman at The New York Times infamously put it.

At the Republican National Convention in 2016, Trump said, “I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens” from a “hateful foreign ideology.” Trump was, of course, pitting gays against Muslims with the “foreign ideology” comment, which gave him some breathing room with the far right.

Still, Trump’s language and stunts from ‘16 now seem otherworldly. It’s hard to believe in 2024, when the MAGA extremist wife of a MAGA extremist Supreme Court justice has expressed her revulsion at the sight of a rainbow flag and when some Republicans have called for burning Pride flags, that we’ll see Trump ever go near the Pride flag. Nor will we hear any embrace of “LGBT” or “Q.”

Trump is straightjacketed on the issue of LGBTQ rights, having created a party that has further constricted even him. Yet, Trump, who has a ceiling and cannot get beyond 46% of the national vote, needs votes desperately, as witnessed by the humiliation he withstood in going to the Libertarian Party convention to try to get their endorsement.

So his approach now to LGBTQ people is to try to get their support while keeping any efforts to do so in the closet and having groups like Log Cabin—not the campaign and certainly not him—telling queer people to vote for him because he’ll supposedly do more about inflation or whatever, and to just ignore their own rights.

Trump’s a con man, and he knows a sucker is born every day. But even for him, that is a pretty feeble pitch.