I’ll never buy Donald Trump as gay positive. But I’d bet on gay blasé.
“I think it’s absolutely fine,” he said when asked in a Fox News interview about displays of affection between Pete Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten. “That’s something that perhaps some people will have a problem with. I have no problem with it whatsoever. I think it’s good.”
He not only picked an openly gay man, Richard Grenell, to be the American ambassador to Germany but also reportedly moons over Grenell’s good looks. “He can’t say two sentences about Grenell without saying how great of a looking guy he is,” an unnamed associate of Trump’s told Axios’s Jonathan Swan. When Trump catches the ambassador on TV, he gushes, “Oh, there’s my beautiful Grenell!”
During the 2016 campaign, he spoke out against a North Carolina law forbidding transgender people to use bathrooms consistent with their gender identity and said that Caitlyn Jenner could use the commode of her choice in Trump Tower.
And then, of course, there was his speech at the Republican National Convention, when he carefully enunciated “L.G.B.T.Q.,” pledged to protect those of us represented by that consonant cluster and, upon hearing applause, added, “I have to say, as a Republican, it is so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said.”
Description
Richard Allen Grenell is an American diplomat, civil servant, and media consultant. He currently serves as the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, and the Special Presidential Envoy for Serbia and Kosovo Peace Negotiations, and briefly served as acting Director of National Intelligence in the Trump administration. Wikipedia
Gay Republican group endorses Trump in reversal from 2016
Then Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump holds a rainbow flag given to him by a supporter during a campaign rally at the University of Northern Colorado on Oct. 30, 2016 in Greeley, Colorado.Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images file
The Log Cabin Republicans, the nation’s largest collective of LGBTQ conservatives, has officially endorsed the re-election of President Donald Trump — after its board of directors voted against endorsing him in 2016 — stating that Trump has advanced LGBTQ rights and helped the GOP move past “culture wars” during his tenure.
In a Washington Post Op-Ed published on Thursday evening, Robert Kabel, chairman of the group, and Jill Homan, its vice president, wrote that “for LGBTQ Republicans, watching the 2016 GOP convention before Donald Trump was like a dream fulfilled” and marked the beginning of Trump removing gay rights “as a wedge issue from the old Republican handbook” and “taking bold actions that benefit the LGBTQ community.”
The group, which announced new board leadership in March, cites Trump’s commitment to end HIV/AIDS in 10 years, which was met both was cautious optimism and flat-out skepticism, and his work with Richard Grenell, the openly gay U.S. ambassador to Germany, to encourage other nations to end the criminalization of homosexuality, as examples of his dedication to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community.
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It also states that other Trump policies, which were not specifically delineated as LGBTQ policies, such as his tax cuts, trade deals and “hard line on foreign policy,” have benefited gay Americans.
Though the Log Cabin Republicans are lending their support to Trump, the group said that it does not agree with all of his and his administrations’ actions, including the so-called transgender military ban.
“We are committed to letting all qualified Americans serve in the military,” the Log Cabin Republicans wrote. “We oppose the transgender service restriction and will continue to press the administration to reconsider.”
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The Log Cabin Republicans endorsement of Trump comes as it marks a reversal from its 2016 stance.
The former president of the Log Cabin Republicans, Gregory T. Angelo, has been critical of policies enacted under Trump in the past. Three years ago, he issued a statement against Trump’s election platform, which he called “the most anti-LGBT platform in the party’s 162-year history.”
“Opposition to marriage equality, nonsense about bathrooms, an endorsement of the debunked psychological practice of ‘pray the gay away’ — it’s all in there,” he wrote at the time. “This isn’t my GOP, and I know it’s not yours either.”
Yet, Angelo appears to have had a change of heart, writing on Twitter Thursday night that the Log Cabin Republicans’ endorsement of Trump should have come in 2016.
Not all members of the Log Cabin Republicans agree with the group’s assessment of Trump’s track record on LGBTQ issues.
Jordan Evans, who became the only openly transgender Republican elected official after she was elected the Town Constable of Charlton, Massachusetts, in 2017, said she was “extremely upset” by the group’s endorsement.
“I’m awestruck that they would endorse Trump, given his track record that’s been nothing but detrimental to the LGBTQ community,” Evans said. “Especially because we have another Republican candidate — Bill Weld — so to not even give him a chance or to wait to make an endorsement until after the RNC convention is unexplainable.”
Evans added that the group’s endorsement was indicative of the “greater disconnect” between Republicans and LGBTQ individuals and that it would make it harder for the Log Cabin Republicans to collaborate with other queer groups who were already “weary” to work with them.
“We keep falling back on the queer issues of yesterday, but we need to approach this new horizon, which includes fighting for public accommodations and transgender rights,” Evans said. “We should be focusing on how we can have an effective voice, not going backwards.”
A number of gay Democrats have also disavowed the endorsement.
“Hey @LogCabinGOP, that endorsement seems even more #%** stupid today…,” Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Sims, D-Philadelphia, wrote on Twitter.
“You’re an embarrassment. And a sympathizer for a racist, queerphobic regime,” Jonathan D. Lovitz, senior vice president of the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce, wrote in response to a tweet from Richard Walters, the chief of staff for the Republican National Committee, sharing news of the endorsement. “History will always remember where people like you and the @LogCabinGOP stood.”
In addition to the president’s contentious transgender military policy, which bars transgender personnel from serving openly and denies them access to gender-affirming medical care, the Health and Human Services Department proposed a new rule in May suggesting that federal laws banning sex discrimination in health care don’t apply to patients’ “gender identity.”
United States citizenship has also been denied to some children of LGBTQ couples, and just this week, the Trump administration unveiled a proposed rule that would greatly expand the exemption that allows religious entities to ignore anti-discrimination laws by broadening the definition to include federal contractors that declare themselves to be religious — a rule that LGBTQ advocates have decried as a license to discriminate.
While the Log Cabin Republicans are a significant endorsement for Trump, LGBTQ voters are a reliable part of the Democratic base, according to exit polls. In the 2018 midterm elections, over 80 percent of LGBTQ people said they voted for the Democrat in their local federal election, while just 17 percent voted for the Republican. And in 2016, 78 percent of LGBTQ voters said they voted for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, while just 14 percent reported supporting Donald Trump.
President Trump on Thursday ramped up his war with social media companies by signing an executive order that aims to curtail their legal liability protections – two days after Twitter slapped fact check labels to a pair of his tweets about fraud in mail-in voting for the first time.
“We’re here today to defend free speech from one of the greatest dangers it has faced in American history,” Trump said before signing the executive order in the Oval Office where Attorney General Bill Barr was present.
“A small handful of powerful social media monopolies,” Trump said, “had unchecked power to censure, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter virtually any form of communication between private citizens or large public audiences.”
Trump declared, “We can’t let this continue to happen, it’s very, very unfair.”
The president added, “This censorship and bias is a threat to freedom itself. Imagine if your phone company silenced or edited your conversation. Social media companies have vastly more power in the United States than newspapers, they’re by far more rich than any other traditional forms of communication.”
Social media companies “that engage in censoring or any political conduct will not be able to keep their liability shield,” Trump vowed, adding that companies “like Twitter enjoy an unprecedented liability shield based on the theory that they are a neutral platform — which they are not.”
“My executive order further instructed the Federal Trade Commission to prohibit social media companies from engaging in any deceptive acts or practices,” said the commander in chief who at one point held up a copy of Thursday’s NY Post featuring a lead member of Twitter’s policing team who once called the president a “racist tangerine.”
Trump’s order directs federal agencies to look at whether they can place new regulations on the tech giants like Twitter, Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube.
“There’s no precedent in American history for so small a number of corporations to control so large a sphere of human interaction,” said Trump who claimed that Twitter is making “editorial decisions.”
“As president, I’m not allowing the American people to be bullied by these giant corporations. Many people have wanted this to be done by presidents for a long time,” he said, adding, “I’ve been called by Democrats that want to do this and so I think you could possibly have a bipartisan situation.”
The order calls for new regulations under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 landmark federal law that largely exempts online platforms from legal liability for material posted by their users, allowing them to be treated more like publishers.
Rolling back those regulations would expose the tech companies to more civil liability thjrough lawsuits.
“Free speech is the bedrock of American democracy. Our Founding Fathers protected this sacred right with the First Amendment to the Constitution. The freedom to express and debate ideas is the foundation for all of our rights as a free people,” the order opens.
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“In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand pick the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet. This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic. When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power. They cease functioning as passive bulletin boards, and ought to be viewed and treated as content creators.”
It goes on to note, “Today, many Americans follow the news, stay in touch with friends and family, and share their views on current events through social media and other online platforms. As a result, these platforms function in many ways as a 21st century equivalent of the public square. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube wield immense, if not unprecedented, power to shape the interpretation of public events; to censor, delete, or disappear information; and to control what people see or do not see.”
In a clear reference to Twitter’s fact check on Trump’s mail-in ballot tweets and Yoel Roth, the social media company’s executive who helped introduce the fact-check system earlier this month, the order says, “Twitter now selectively decides to place a warning label on certain tweets in a manner that clearly reflects political bias. As has been reported, Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician’s tweet. As recently as last week, Representative Adam Schiff was continuing to mislead his followers by peddling the long-disproved Russian Collusion Hoax, and Twitter did not flag those tweets. Unsurprisingly, its officer in charge of so-called ‘Site Integrity’ has flaunted his political bias in his own tweets.
Barr said the order “sets up a rulemaking procedure that will eventually be under the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] to try to get back to the original interpretation and understanding of Section 230.”
“It also empowers the Attorney General to work with state attorneys general to come up with model legislation that addresses this mistake,” Barr said. “And we’re preparing federal legislation, which we’ll be sending over shortly, for the consideration of the Office of Management budget.”
Barr noted that the order does not “repeal” Section 230.
“I’m not against Section 230 if it was properly applied, but it’s been stretched and I don’t know anyone on Capitol Hill who doesn’t agree that it’s been stretched beyond its original intention,” he said.
The attorney general said the law has been “completely stretched to allow it to become really behemoths who control a lot of the flow of information in our society to engage in censorship of that information and to act as editors and publishers of the material.”
Barr compared the censorship to that of “foreign governments like Communist China.”
The order also calls for a review of “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” by the social media companies and for the FCC to determine whether actions like the editing of content by the tech companies should lead to the firms forfeiting the protections under Section 230.
Trump’s executive order calls on the government to reassess whether federal online advertising dollars should be held back from the social media giants if they “restrict free speech.”
Legal experts argue that any effort to modify Section 230 would be hit with a court challenge and is likely unconstitutional.
And Trump said he predicts “they’ll be doing a lawsuit,” but did not specify further.
When asked by a reporter during the signing of the executive order whether Trump — a prolific tweeter with more than 80 million followers — will delete his account, the president said, “If you weren’t fake. I would do it in a heartbeat. If we had a fair press in this country, I would do that in a heartbeat. There’s nothing I’d rather do than get rid of my own Twitter account.”
Earlier in the day, ahead of the signing, Trump tweeted, “This will be a Big Day for Social Media and FAIRNESS!”
On Tuesday, Twitter attached warning links to two of Trump’s tweets in which the president claimed that allowing large scale mail-in voting would result in a “rigged election.”
“Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” the label on the tweets state, and redirects users to news articles and disputing that voting-by-mail would allow for rampant fraud.
With Post wires
