Since the Orlando Terror Attack Trump Has Actively Been Courting the LGBT Vote
Wednesday afternoon Donald Trump told supporters that gay people – all of us – support his response to the horrific terror attack in Orlando, which took 49 lives and injured another 53 people. Trump has decided to actually use the LGBT community as pawns in his presidential campaign, immediately after the deadliest terror attack since 9/11, the deadliest mass shooting in our nation’s history, and an unspeakable anti-LGBT hate crime.
“The LGBT community, the gay community, the lesbian community, they are so much in favor of what I’ve been saying over the last three or four days,” Trump told supporters in downtown Atlanta about an hour ago.
That, of course, is a lie.
First, the “LGBT community, the gay community, the lesbian community” – he left out bisexual, transgender, and other groups – are not monolithic. While the vast, vast majority of LGBT people support Democratic candidates, a small percent do support Trump and his policies, even after having called him a “sociopath,” comparing him to Adolf Hitler, and calling his supporters “morons.”
For the record, Trump likely was referring to two tweets from Twitter accounts that are fake. They are supposedly from LGBT groups which do not exist, the spell LGBT “LBGT,” just as Trump did when talking about the LGBT community, and they have been debunked by Snopes. It’s anybody’s guess who created the fraudulent accounts, and it’s stunning that Trump for days has been lying the the “LBGT” or LGBT community support him.
On Tuesday, Trump posted this insane tweet, suggesting the LGBT community somehow, maybe, perhaps, (because who the heck knows what his words actually mean?) “the LGBT community” now supports him.
But the vast, vast majority of the LGBT community – not that I speak for them, but polls do – do not support Donald Trump or his policies.
On Monday during a speech on terrorism the Republican candidate for president falsely claimed he is the most pro-gay candidate in any major party running for office, and assailed the Obama administration’s record on LGBT civil rights, which he called “LBGT.”
All this comes literally less than a week after Trump spoke before hundreds of well-connected politically active evangelical Christians, promising them he will restore faith to where it belongs, he supports so-called traditional marriage, (“so important,”) and so on.
Donald Trump, for the record, opposes same-sex marriage, and now opposes the right of transgender people to use restrooms that correspond with their gender identity. Trump supports the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA), which hands anyone in the nation the “right” to discriminate against LGBT people. He has said he will likely put justices on the Supreme Court who will overturn the right of same-sex couples to marry. Trump’s anti-immigration policies also dramatically affect the LGBT community. Few of Trump’s LGBT-related policies other than these are known because he refuses to answer direct questions with direct answers.
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