Trump's obsession with hate and lies could kill LGBTQ+ people

Exasperated by the rat-tat-tat of lies, Joe Scarborough recently stammered for several long seconds on MSNBC’s Morning Joe after a video montage showed Donald Trump, Sen. JD Vance and Trump’s family at a rally asserting that Democrats are trying to kill the Republican presidential nominee.

“Those who want to stop us from achieving this future have slandered me, impeached me, indicted me, tried to throw me off the ballot,” Trump said on October 5 at the Butler, Pa., the site of an assassination attempt last July. “And who knows? Maybe even tried to kill me.”

Trump continued, “We have an enemy from within [Democrats], which I think is much more dangerous than the outside enemy.”

“This is no longer a fight between Republican versus Democrat. Left versus right. It is good versus evil,” said Lara Trump, the Republican National Committee co-chair training evangelical Christians to harvest election ballots.

Scarborough was speechless. “The level of un-American activity that you just saw is stunning. That is un-American,” he said. “They know they’re lying. Donald Trump knows that’s a lie” that promotes violence. “This is an increasingly desperate person, an increasingly desperate family, who’s preparing for civil war.”

For some, it’s spiritual warfare. “I see him as somebody chosen” by God, Gayle Cameron, 57, told the New York Times at the Butler rally.

If truth is “the first casualty” of war, Trump’s team excuses throwing words as bombs. During his Oct. 2 vice presidential debate with Gov. Tim Walz, Vance said the real threat to democracy is the threat of censorship against the Right to Lie.

“It's Kamala Harris saying that rather than debate and persuade her fellow Americans, she'd like to censor people who engage in misinformation,” Vance said about the Democratic Presidential nominee.

Trump knows what triggers Christian nationalists who demand their religious “right of conscience” to discriminate.

“The path back to American unity is not to surrender the culture wars. The path back to national unity is to decisively win the culture wars,” Trump told the Heritage Foundation April 22, 2022. “That includes winning the war to restore free speech in America.”

Older LGBTQ+ activists know this code. Evangelicals have long preached that the Bible prescribes death for homosexuals. And Trump’s phrase “the enemy within” recalls the 1950s when his cruel closeted mentor Roy Cohn launched an anti-Communist crusade with Republican extremist Sen. Joseph McCarthy to root out the “Red Menace” and its twin evil, “dangerous and contagious” homosexual “perverts” lurking in plain sight.

Project 2025 theocrats are reprising the “Lavender Scare” in their plan to erase the “monster” words “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from every federal rule, regulation and law.

“The Cruelty is the Point”, journalist Adam Serwer noted in The Atlantic. The ugly MAGA obsession with “the Other” also anticipates that their Supreme Court will kill marriage equality as it did abortion rights. They also expect SCOTUS to decide if public school children have the right to determine their own identity and express that through chosen pronouns.

A victory seems remote for LGBTQ+ youth. For many, the pain of inauthenticity may be too much to bear, even with a loving, supportive family.

Trump doesn’t care. He delights in triggering haters, including lone wolves who believe they have permission to kill LGBTQ+ people.

In her Sept. 17 interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, Vice President Harris told Politico’s Eugene Daniels that while she feels safe with Secret Service protection, “there are far too many people in our country right now who are not feeling safe. I look at Project 2025 and I look at the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ laws coming out of Florida.

Members of the LGBTQ community don’t feel safe right now.”

Harris also recognizes marriage equality as a “basic” civil right.

“We have a class of Americans in this country that we treat as second-class citizens on these issues. And it is just fundamentally unfair. It goes against the very founding principles of our country,” that all people “should be treated as equals,” then-California Attorney General Harris said in 2012.

Cold-hearted Trump, on the other hand, only cares about power. “Which would you rather be - a dumb person or a dictator?” Trump asked a Heritage Foundation audience. “I don’t know. Perhaps a dictator would be better. I don’t want to be a dumb person.”

This election is truly existential for LGBTQ+ people.

Karen Ocamb is a veteran LGBTQ journalist who produced a “We Won’t Go Back” video with Max Huskins explaining how the government generated antigay hatred in the 1950s.

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