ABOVE: Melania Trump, screenshot via Log Cabin Republicans.
First lady Melania Trump delivered a message directly to LGBTQ people who support her husband Thursday, asserting in a video message amid accusations Trump is anti-LGBTQ “nothing could be further from the truth.”
Melania Trump says her husband’s leadership continues to anger the political establishment, whom she blames for portraying Trump is anti-LGBTQ (despite evidence backing that up perception, such as his administration implementing a transgender military ban and arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court against LGBTQ protections under civil rights law).
“I was shocked to discover that some of these powerful people have tried to paint my husband as anti-gay or against equality,” Melania Trump says. “Nothing could be further from the truth. Donald loves helping people, and he loves seeing those around him and his country succeed.”
Melania Trump intimates in the video Trump has taken a new approach to the LGBTQ community that is different from the Republican Party’s anti-gay past. (Although she enumerates gay and lesbian people, she omits other segments of the LGBTQ community, including transgender people, who have been hardest hit by Trump’s policies.)
“As the leader of the Republican Party, and president of the United States, Donald has been clear that gays and lesbians will be treated as he has always treated them: Equally,” Melania Trump says.
Melania Trump touts Trump as the first president ever to enter the White House in support of same-sex marriage, a reference to him saying he’s “fine” with the U.S. Supreme Court decision for marriage equality in 2015, and having an openly the first openly gay Cabinet member, a reference to the appointment of Richard Grenell as acting director of national intelligence.
The first lady makes the video as part of the Outspoken, the newly launched media project for Log Cabin Republicans, which seeks to highlight LGBTQ conservatives as part of the effort to re-elect Trump in the 2020 election amid criticism they’re helping to re-elect an anti-LGBTQ leader.
“Today, we see free-thinkers and independent voices like gay conservatives and Log Cabin Republicans silence, censored and bullied by cancel culture mobs,” Melania Trump says. “This is not the American want to live in. America was founded on God-given rights of freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of expression. We are a nation that celebrates and protects diversity and we condemn those who built and intimidate people. We do not want to live in place without freedom where people are forced to think alike.”
Melania Trump appears in the video just days before Election Day, when voters in a race deemed critical for LGBTQ people will determine whether to re-elect Trump or oust him from the White House in favor of Joe Biden.
