President Trump's advisers are suddenly talking about LGBTQ people as they scramble to find new voter support. Photo / Erin Schaff, The New York Times
LGBTQ advocates say the president has tried to divide their coalition by targeting transgender people in policy rollbacks.
The month of June was filled with big moments for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
In that monthlong stretch, the Supreme Court rendered a sweeping decision providing workplace protections for gay and transgender people. It came shortly before the five-year anniversary of the high court's landmark ruling on marriage equality. LGBTQ people and others commemorated the murder of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Florida in June 2016. Thousands marched in Brooklyn, New York, in support of Black transgender lives.
President Donald Trump was almost entirely silent through it all.
There was no tweet in honor of Pride Month, despite suggestions from several aides to Trump that he write one. No rollout of a coalition aimed at LGBTQ voters by his campaign, despite preparations that had been made for one. Embassies overseas were told they couldn't fly the community's gay pride flag.
There was, however, a rollback by the Trump administration of a regulation put in place by the Obama administration in 2016 to mandate health care as a civil right for transgender patients under the Affordable Care Act.
It is what many in the LGBTQ coalition have come to expect from Trump, who during his 2016 presidential campaign used gay people as a wedge against Muslims, whom he painted broadly as extremists, following the shootings at Orlando's Pulse nightclub by a Muslim man. While Trump has signalled a willingness to publicly align himself with some gay men and women, he selected a deeply conservative running mate in Vice President Mike Pence and as president has systematically dismantled protections implemented by President Barack Obama, especially for transgender people.
Just over two months before Election Day, Trump is trailing in almost every poll to Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, whom activists credit with pushing Obama to support same-sex marriage. And Trump's advisers are suddenly talking about LGBTQ people as they scramble to find new voter support.
Last weekend, the campaign announced the LGBTQ coalition that had been expected in June, blaming the delay on the coronavirus.
And now Trump officials are turning to Richard Grenell, the openly gay former U.S. ambassador to Germany who served for three months as the acting director of national intelligence, to sell the president and attack Biden.
Grenell, whom Trump likes in part because he declassified material related to the investigation into whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russian officials in 2016, appeared in a video released by the Log Cabin Republicans, a group that "represents LGBT conservatives." Grenell, whose praise for Trump and criticisms of Biden's record were deemed dishonest by the Washington Post fact-checker, is expected to speak at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night.
Alphonso David, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ civil rights group, responded, "We're not taking the bait."
For years, now, David said, the president has tried to divide the coalition by targeting transgender people in particular, with actions that affect the entire coalition.
"The Trump administration is looking to drive a wedge within the LGBTQ community between LGB and T," David said.
Tori Cooper, the group's director of community engagement for the transgender justice initiative, said that the administration is especially focused on people who have the least protection in society, transgender people of color.
"It shows the cowardice — that's the word I like to use of the current president," Cooper said.
The targeting of transgender people has extended across the federal government: a ban on transgender service in the military, an effort at the Education Department to block transgender students from choosing which bathroom to use, the rollback of health care protections by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Justice Department's move to end protections for transgender people in federal prisons.
Last month, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed allowing homeless shelters to deny transgender people access to single-sex shelters, and this month, the Education Department's office of civil rights publicly moved to block transgender girls from joining female track teams in Connecticut high schools.
Grenell, in the video, cited almost no specific domestic policy accomplishment that Trump achieved on LGBTQ rights, as he made the pitch that Trump is the "most pro-gay president in American history." Instead, Grenell referred to his own appointment as well as to the president's acceptance of the Supreme Court's ruling of same-sex marriage as constitutional and his efforts to push countries that criminalise being gay to end those practices. In the video, Grenell specifically mentioned gays and lesbians but not transgender people.
And the night before Grenell's scheduled speech, a convention speaker praised Trump for his administration's revocation of some protections for transgender students.
To describe Trump as supportive of gay people because he appointed Grenell is the essence of "tokenism," David said.
"It's actually offensive," he said, "because you are appointing someone but removing all the rights associated with that identity."
Some administration officials have acknowledged that they see targeting transgender rights as different from gay rights.
In a statement, Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said, "While the radical left has pushed false and disgusting accusations that LGBT Americans, which includes me, are threatened under this administration, that could not be further from the truth."
Judd said that Trump has hired LGBTQ people across the government, mentioning Grenell again; cited the president's commitment at last year's State of the Union address to ending HIV transmissions in the country by 2030; and said the president "launched a global campaign to decriminalise homosexuality, standing in solidarity with all LGBT people who live in dozens of counties around the globe that punish, imprison and even execute individuals based on their sexual orientation."
There's no evidence that Trump's campaign to decriminalise homosexuality has had any effect or that it's been substantially different from what Obama had attempted. For instance, White House officials declined to say whether Trump had raised the brutal anti-gay purges by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, with whom he has spoken several times in recent months. His HIV pledge was similarly met with scepticism.
Trump is famously transactional, and the support he has given LGBTQ people has usually been in connection with celebrity or support they have given him.
Trump allowed gay members into his Florida club Mar-a-Lago as long as they could pay the exorbitant membership fee; he broadcast donations to groups like the Gay Men's Health Crisis when the AIDS epidemic became a celebrity cause; and he publicly embraced the civil union between singer Elton John, someone whose music and fame Trump admires, and John's longtime partner, David Furnish.
In 2015, when Trump was just a few months into the Republican primary contest, some of his advisers discussed a plan for exiting the campaign if his poll numbers dropped. The plan, according to one person with direct knowledge of the discussions, was for Trump to say that the party did not agree with him on a number of issues, including same-sex marriage, even though he had never publicly supported it.
But after Trump won the New Hampshire primary, his advisers knew he needed the support of evangelical voters. So in an interview with former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly in 2016, Trump said, "I take a lot of heat because I come from New York. You know, from New York, it's like, how you can be against gay marriage? But I'm opposed to gay marriage."
Christine Quinn, the first openly gay speaker of the New York City Council, said Trump's New York business background makes his actions as president "worse — because he knows better."
As president, Trump has not demagogued LGBTQ issues the way he has with immigrants, Muslims and Black people protesting systemic police brutality.
But Trump's embrace of initiatives promoting religious freedom has been used by people inside and outside his government to justify discrimination against gay and transgender people.
Over many years, Trump has been skeptical about whether he gets any political benefit from the LGBTQ community, turning frequently to Pence, who was Trump's bridge to evangelical voters in 2016, for advice, according to administration officials. Those are the voters Trump is most anxious about losing.
Charles Moran, a spokesman for the Log Cabin Republicans, conceded that he would have preferred that Trump acknowledge Pride Month in June. But he maintained that the president is being treated unfairly and said that Obama's pro-LGBTQ regulations were legal overreach.
"The LGBT left and what I call 'Gay Inc.' has hijacked the narrative," Moran said, adding that he himself had to get educated quickly on transgender-related issues. He accused groups like the Human Rights Campaign of being unwilling to engage with the White House.
"My phone calls get returned" by the White House, he said. "There is a genuine willingness to work with us in our community."
The Log Cabin Republicans did not endorse Trump in 2016, and the group's current support has caused a rift within its ranks. Jerri Ann Henry, the group's first woman executive director, resigned in August 2019 over the pending endorsement.
"Ultimately what should be promised is not devotion to a specific class or group of people but dedication to the set of principles," she said, "and Trump has not shown his devotion to that set of principles."
Last month, Trump was questioned about whether he would consider rescinding his ban on transgender people entering the military by a reporter for The Washington Blade, a gay newspaper.
Trump gestured to his chin, appearing to signal the reporter's mask was muffling him.
"I can't hear you," Trump said. "I can't hear a word you're saying." He never answered the question.
Written by: Maggie Haberman
Photographs by: Angel Franco and Erin Schaff
© 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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