U.S. President Donald Trump said he was a different kind of Republican. As someone from liberal New York, he signaled that he would be the person to finally move his political party on LGBTQ issues. He held up a Pride flag at a campaign event, and he said the key acronym (“L, G, B, T … Q”) at the 2016 Republican convention. But Trump’s administration, based on its first year, has been anything but LGBTQ-friendly.
“He campaigned saying that he would be a good friend to LGBT people,” James Esseks, director of the ACLU’s LGBT and HIV Project, said. “Actions speak far louder than words. And what he’s done has been a wreck.”
In its first year, the Trump administration has tried to reinstate a ban on transgender people in the military. It has nominated multiple people to the courts and elsewhere who have anti-LGBTQ records. It has directed its army of federal lawyers to take the anti-LGBTQ side in court cases. And it has done some extraordinarily petty things, like refusing to recognize Pride Month.
Together, it all marks a significant shift from President Barack Obama’s administration. In the runup to his 2012 reelection, Obama became the first sitting president to support same-sex marriage. His administration interpreted civil rights law to protect trans people where other existing laws failed to. It reversed “don’t ask, don’t tell” — which banned gay people from serving openly in the military — and began to reverse a similar ban on open trans service members. In court cases in which it chimed in, the Obama administration was a reliable ally of LGBTQ rights causes. And it took on smaller yet still symbolic causes, such as designating the Stonewall Inn as a national monument.
The Trump administration, based on a review of what it’s done so far, has essentially worked to undo all of this progress. It can’t undo all of it — same-sex marriage, for example, is the law of the land and looks to remain that way.
But the Trump administration is certainly trying. From Trump’s nominations for courts that will decide the expanse of LGBTQ rights across the country to his administration dictating who has basic civil right protections, it’s an agenda that could seriously harm LGBTQ people in the years and perhaps decades to come.