Metro Weekly

The Trouble with Trump

Donald Trump wants to be a “friend” to the LGBT community. With friends like him, who needs enemies?

Donald Trump - Photo: Gage Skidmore / Flickr
Donald Trump – Photo: Gage Skidmore / Flickr

“Ask yourself, who is really the friend of women and the LGBT community,” Donald Trump said during a rally in New Hampshire last month, in the wake of the attacks in Orlando. “Donald Trump with his actions, or Hillary Clinton with her words?”

Unfortunately for Trump, it’s words, not actions, that have increasingly put him at odds with the LGBT community — or, at the very least, left them confused as to where the perma-oranged property mogul really stands on the issues. While many criticize Clinton for her long political career, with frequent changes in stance on certain policies enshrined both in print and online, Trump has a similar wealth of quotes and speeches attributed to him from his long and consistently outspoken career.

Back in the hazy days of 2000, Y2K had transpired to be a big fuss about nothing, America was preparing to elect an inept fool for president, and Trump was sitting down with The Advocate to discuss gay rights. At the time, he was exploring a presidential run with the Reform Party, and was asked why gays and lesbians should be interested in him.

“I grew up in New York City…. It breeds tolerance,” he said. “I don’t care whether or not a person is gay. I judge people based on their capability, honesty, and merit…. Their lifestyle is of no interest to me.”

He told The Advocate that he would appoint gay people to a Trump administration because “sexual orientation would be meaningless,” as he was only looking for “brains and experience.” Trump also said he would alter the Civil Rights Act to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, wanted an end to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, that “it turned [his] stomach” when he heard about Matthew Shepard’s murder, and he “absolutely” supported hate-crime legislation.

Trump also made it clear that he did not support same-sex marriage, but thought same-sex couples should be guaranteed the same legal protections and rights as married couples.

Flash forward eleven years.

“They should not be able to marry,” Trump reiterated to The Des Moines Register in 2011. When asked if same-sex couples deserve the same benefits as married couples, he said, “[my] attitude on it has not been fully formed.” Asked again about marriage and civil benefits, he then offered a definitive answer: “As of this moment, no and no.”

While his support for protections has changed, same-sex marriage has long been one of the few things Trump hasn’t flip-flopped on. While he’s thus far bailed on two wives and is eleven years into his third marriage, he has yet to give up his strong opposition to two people of the same sex tying the knot. When the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage last year, Trump tweeted that the court had “let us down.” Two days later, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Trump if his support for “traditional marriage” stretched to cover his three weddings. Never one to give a direct answer when challenged, Trump told Tapper he had “a very good point.”

Despite a majority of Americans now supporting marriage equality, Trump refuses to budge. In January this year, he told Fox News he would “strongly consider” appointing justices to the Supreme Court that would overrule marriage equality. (This from a man who last July told Fox News that marriage was “an issue that [has] been determined” and in August told The Hollywood Reporter that attempts to pass a constitutional amendment banning marriage equality were “not going to happen.” In October CBN reported that Trump considered marriage equality “the law of the land.”)

If marriage equality is a no-go, perhaps Trump is on-board with anti-discrimination protections for same-sex couples? He intimated as much in his Advocate interview, and backed that up with further statements. His 2000 manifesto even called for an America unencumbered by “racism, discrimination against women, or discrimination against people based on sexual orientation.” It’s hard to ignore the irony there, given that scapegoating Muslims and Mexicans, insulting women, and turning his back on the LGBT community are cornerstones of his 2016 campaign.

Still, in 2011, Trump told The Brody File that there “can be no discrimination against gays.” Even last year, during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Trump affirmed support for gay employees who are fired for their sexuality. “I don’t think [sexual orientation] should be a reason” for firing someone, he said, adding that he was “willing to go with what the Courts are saying.” (Except when it comes to marriage equality.)

As Trump attempts to woo the religious right, he has increasingly shifted towards supporting measures that would harm the LGBT community. During a speech at the Iowa Faith and Family Coalition, Breitbart reported Trump saying he “[feels] so strongly” about religious liberty, a tool increasingly used by the right to enshrine in law discrimination against the LGBT community. Refusing to serve a gay couple in a restaurant, or telling a transgender woman she can’t shop in your store, or any other number of practices are protected as long as the discriminator claims it was based on their religious beliefs. Trump, for all his past statements on loving gay people, now fully supports such measures. At that same event, he vowed that his first priority as president would be to “preserve and protect our religious liberty.”

In September last year, Trump told the Huffington Post that he supported Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples because of her religion. “I haven’t been opposed to her stand and I think it’s fine.” Unfortunately for The Donald, that’s not entirely true. Earlier that month, he told Bill O’Reilly that being clerk was “not the right job for her” because “we had a ruling” from the Supreme Court. “You have to do what the Supreme court ultimately [says] — whether you like the ruling or not,” he reiterated. (Again, supporting the legality of a ruling that he later said he would try to overthrow.)

Trump’s support for so-called religious liberty (something that is already protected in the constitution) has been compounded by reports that he’s close to tapping Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his Vice President. Pence championed his state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a disastrous piece of legislation that allowed discrimination against LGBT people and led to a boycott of the state by businesses, removing $60 million from the state’s bank account in the process. Two months later, Indiana “fixed” the law. If Pence is VP, he’s bringing a lot of anti-LGBT sentiment to the Trump ticket. However, the alternative is apparently former GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, who, like Trump, has been married three times, but opposes the right of his lesbian half-sister, Candace, to marry.

Just this week, the GOP officials charged with forming the party’s 2016 platform affirmed their opposition to LGBT rights. On marriage, adoption, and transgender people, they remain opposed. Officials squabbled over just how anti-transgender they wanted to be, with one Kentucky delegate calling it “mind-boggling” that the GOP was elevating the issue to such an extent, while a North Carolina delegate said “Bathrooms aren’t the issue. It is locker rooms, dressing rooms.”

Here, Trump had previously seemed to be something of a moderate. Earlier this year, he told NBC’s Today that transgender people should use “whatever bathroom they feel is appropriate.” He opposed North Carolina’s anti-trans HB 2 law, calling it a “problem.” He also said that Caitlyn Jenner could use the women’s bathroom in Trump Tower, an invitation she later accepted in a video on her Facebook page.

Unfortunately, it was a stance that was never going to sit well with his party’s conservative base, who are doing their best to paint trans people as the devil reincarnate. In May, he told Bill O’Reilly that he wasn’t sure if trans rights were human rights and said gender-neutral bathrooms would be “unbelievably expensive.” This month, he told The News & Observer that he was “with the states” on anti-trans bathroom bills like North Carolina’s.

“Let’s be clear, Donald Trump just gave one of the nation’s worst laws for LGBTQ people a full-throated endorsement,” JoDee Winterhof, senior vice president for policy and political affairs at the Human Rights Campaign, said in a press release.

A reminder that this reversal came just a couple of weeks after telling his supporters that “Hillary Clinton can never claim to be a friend of the gay community” and saying “ask the gays” who their true friend is. (Gays on Twitter, predictably, tore him to shreds.)

Last year, CNN’s Don Lemon, who is openly gay, interviewed Trump.

“If I ask you this question, will you answer directly?” Lemon said. “Do you think that you are homophobic?”

“No,” Trump replied. “I think that I am a very nice person. I love people.”

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