Donald Trump's Gay AmnesiaDo you remember his convention speech? Does he?
President Trump at a rally in Greeley, Colorado in 2016 holding a flag that says "LGBTs for Trump," from a supporter in the audience.It is, oddly, the part of Donald Trump's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2016 that I remember best mostly because it surprised me but also because I had a personal stake in it.
"As your president," Trump thundered, "I will do everything in my power to protect our L.G.B.T.Q. citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology." He enunciated that consonant cluster with extra crispness, as if especially proud of himself.
The audience applauded, prompting him to add: "I have to say, as a Republican, it is so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said."
But what precisely
had he said? And what were those cheers really for? Hindsight tells a story different from the one at the time.
The T refers to transgender people, and several of my Times colleagues reported last weekend that the Department of Health and Human Services is proposing that gender be defined strictly within federal civil rights law "as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with." This move follows other efforts by the Trump administration to marginalize transgender people. The president, for example, has tried to bar them from military service but has been rebuffed by courts.
Meanwhile the Justice Department, under the direction of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has argued that anti-discrimination protections in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 should not extend to gay people. The Obama administration took the opposite tack.
How, then, to interpret Trump's convention speech in retrospect? One takeaway is that those remarks were classic campaign-trail drivel, neither deeply felt nor remotely prophetic. Another is that Trump hadn't yet committed firmly to a low-road approach of pleasing hard-core fans on the far right at the possible expense of less durable supporters in the middle.
But another is that his words at the convention re-examine them closely weren't about L.G.B.T. people, whom he didn't promise to protect,
period. He was focused on what he has frequently called "radical Islamic" beliefs and terror, and was saying that gay people needn't fear the spread of those into America on his watch. He probably feels that he made good on his pledge with the successive versions of his Muslim travel ban.
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So here we are. By "we" I mean Americans generally but L.G.B.T. Americans specifically I'm one of them. That's the personal stake.
With the Supreme Court's 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide, I felt such a potent mix of gratitude, satisfaction and hope. Please read the column I wrote that day.
President Trump has eroded that elation, signaling to me and other minorities that our dignity and welfare matter less than the political points that he can score off us. I'm still confident about the long run. But the present isn't pretty.
Frank Bruni has been with The Times since 1995.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/donald-trumps-gay-amnesia.html
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