Sunday, December 1 was World AIDS Day. As he does every year, President Trump released a statement marking the observance. Predictably, the LGBT community found a way to object; they complained that his statement didn’t specifically mention them.
Alphonso David, president of the leading gay political organization, the Human Rights Campaign, released the following statement: “Another year, another empty World AIDS Day proclamation from Donald Trump. … This administration’s ongoing refusal to even acknowledge the communities most impacted by the HIV epidemic reinforces just how hollow their words continue to be.”
Yet President Obama’s first three World AIDS Day proclamations (2009, 2010, and 2011) also did not mention LGBT people. (RELATED: At The Gay Presidential Forum, Nearly Every Democratic Candidate Misrepresented Trump’s Record)
ORLANDO, FL – JUNE 15: Young people, some wearing Donald Trump attire, wait for Milo Yiannopoulos, a conservative columnist and internet personality, to arrive for a press conference down the street from the Pulse Nightclub, June 15, 2016 in Orlando, Florida. Yiannopoulos was briefly banned from Twitter on Wednesday. The shooting at Pulse Nightclub, which killed 49 people and injured 53, is the worst mass-shooting event in American history. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
When asked about the inconsistency through a press representative, David not respond.
This manufactured outrage at President Trump for slight perceived offenses is nothing new. At the September gay presidential forum, GLAAD president Sarah Kate Ellis boasted of her organization’s “Trump Accountability Project,” which she said identified 125 “attacks against our community, that’s in policy and rhetoric.”
Yet when you look at the actual list, 125 quickly appears to be a gross exaggeration. Among Trump’s “homophobia”:
- That he tweeted attacks against openly gay cable news personalities Shepard Smith and Don Lemon. He didn’t attack them for being gay, or for anything related to homosexuality. But they’re gay, and he attacked them, so it’s “an attack against our community.” Get it?
- That a Trump Administration official used the phrase “a transgender,” as a noun, instead of “transgender,” an adjective.
- That although he now supports gay marriage, he did not in 2011 (at a time when Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and most other Democrats did not either).
Some of the supposed attacks on the gay community are truly bizarre. For example, Bette Midler has long been an icon among gay men. Well, four years before he was elected president, Trump tweeted that the singer is “an extremely unattractive woman” with an “ugly face (and) body.” Ouch!
Also on the list of 125 attacks are things that by no stretch of the imagination are related to the gay community; they’re just on the liberal laundry list, such as Muslim immigration, affirmative action, global warming, and flag burning.
If that’s the best GLAAD can come up with to fill out their list of 125 attacks, they should stop criticizing the president and make him Grand Marshal of the next Pride Parade instead.
The brouhaha over the World AIDS Day proclamation is reminiscent of the furor in the gay community over whether President Trump would issue a proclamation honoring the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots back in June. GLAAD released a statement headlined “President Trump Must Honor 50th Anniversary of Stonewall Riots, LGBTQ Movement.”
One day later, Trump did exactly that, tweeting recognition of Pride Month and the “outstanding contributions LGBT people have made to our great nation.” (RELATED: It’s Not Just Trump: Obama And Gays Themselves Have Been Trans-Cautious)
Predictably, of course, GLAAD didn’t thank the president for doing what they asked. Instead, Ellis tore into Trump yet again, calling his statement “gaslighting.” She did not clarify why two days earlier her group had encouraged Trump to engage in gaslighting.
Any time the Trump Administration does something good on gay issues, the leaders of the gay movement attack him. His administration took significant steps to combat the persecution of gays in Chechnya, but gays complained that the president himself had not been involved.
His Administration has created the most ambitious initiative ever to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide, yet gay activists called those efforts a “lie” and said the president had “no credibility” on the matter. (Normal practice among lobbyists is to praise elected officials who do something good, even if you disagree about other things.)
Supporters of Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump, including gay rights groups, protest against alleged bias outside the CNN offices in Hollywood, California on October 22, 2016. / AFP / Mark RALSTON (Photo credit should read MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images)
The gay community has twisted other issues into an attack on them. When the administration announced a policy that the only flags to fly over U.S. embassies worldwide would be the American flag, gays treated it as an attack on the gay pride flag. When President Trump, who chooses a nickname for all political opponents, gave Mayor Pete Buttigieg the relatively mild sobriquet “Alfred E. Neuman,” the gay Washington Blade counted it as “dog whistle” against the community. (Was Mad Magazine’s mascot gay?)
The gay community was livid that President Trump met with activist Ginni Thomas, who holds views the gay community disagrees with. But presidents have meetings all the time with people whose views they don’t endorse. In fact, in 2014 President Obama met with Sam Kutesa, the Ugandan diplomat behind Uganda’s harsh anti-gay legislation.
It’s true, President Trump has not followed the entire agenda of the LGBT community, especially regarding the increasingly radical demands of transgender and “nonbinary” activists. Community activists taking a nonpartisan approach to political progress for their issues would choose the most pressing topics and lobby on those. (RELATED: Despite What The Liberal Media Says, Trump Is Not Trying To Legalize Job Discrimination Against Gays)
But today’s gay activists (nearly all of whom are liberal Democrats) don’t want to lobby. They want to destroy this president and his administration – and so they will throw anything they can (he called Bette Midler ugly!) at him, and hope the country will be impressed by numbers like “125 attacks.”
American voters are too smart for that. As the president pursues re-election, they’ll be able to see that in the context of past GOP presidents (Reagan, HW Bush) and his rivals for the nomination (Cruz, Rubio) President Trump has been a trailblazer for the gay and lesbian community.
For that, he doesn’t need a proclamation.