During his nominee acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Donald Trump publicly vowed to “protect our LGBTQ citizens” when addressing the audience.
It’s a statement the community keep reminding the current administration – especially as it continues to attempt a ban on trans people from enrolling in the US military, among other decisions that have a profoundly negative impact on LGBTQ Americans.
Trump’s former White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, has now revealed the real reason why the President made the promise – and of course it wasn’t to benefit anyone but himself.
In Spicer’s new book, The Briefing: Politics, The Press, and The President, he claims at that point in time Trump’s team was targeting individuals who weren’t going to vote for him as the party’s nomination, according to Advocate.
“[Trump campaign chairman Paul] Manafort and his lieutenants went one by one down the list of people who had signed the petition and persuaded them to remove their signatures,” Spicer recalls in the book.
“How Manafort and company did this was a scene out of 1950s politics — alternating between carrot and stick and sometimes bat, even, at one point, conveniently making the convention’s parliamentarian unavailable to keep the opposition from formally submitting their petition.”
© Michael Vadon via Flickr
One of those people was Washington DC delegate Robert Sinners who, Sean Spicer alleges, wanted Trump to support LGBTQ rights.
Trump’s senior communications adviser Jason Miller replied to Sinners’ request, according to the book, by assuring that “Trump would be the most ‘inclusive’ candidate the Republican Party ever had.”
The book then alleges that it was only then that Sinners scrubbed his name from the petition, and in turn Trump made this famous statement at the 2016 RNC.
As we all know, the Trump administration’s current record on LGBTQ rights hasn’t been great at all.
As well as attempting to ban trans people from enrolling in the military, a shocking 125 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced across states within a single year of Trump becoming president.
What’s more, for two years in a row the White House has failed to issue a Pride Month proclamation, despite Barack Obama doing so for the full eight years of his presidency.
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