A “barnstorming” tour in search of LGBTQ+ voters for Donald Trump kicked off earlier this month organized by the Log Cabin Republicans (LCR), who are on their own search for proximity to power and cocktail parties should the former president regain the White House.
The MAGA king was nowhere to be found.
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Instead, the mostly straight attendees at the series of “Trump UNITY” events have been served up a D-list from Trump’s gay central casting file, including former acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell, the perpetually tanned election denier who’s inexplicably called Trump “the most pro-gay president in American history”; Bill White, a Trump fundraiser who paid a million-dollar fine to settle charges he was involved in a New York State pension fund pay-to-play scandal; and Black gay Trump supporter Rob Smith, a right-wing social media influencer.
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Also speaking to half-empty hotel ballrooms: second stringers Lara Trump, the nepo-by marriage co-chair of the Republican National Committee; accused child sex-trafficker Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL); and the former president’s second wife for several months, wanted-to-be-a-model Marla Maples, whose daughter Tiffany pitched her own brand of Pride for the Trump campaign several years ago.
Explanations for Grenell’s claim about Trump’s gay largesse were few, if not altogether absent, at events held so far in Detroit and Charlotte, North Carolina.
White, who pitched the get-togethers as “free and will be super fun to attend” in LCR’s “Trump UNITY” tour announcement, pointed to the former president’s fondness for the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” as evidence of his support for the gays.
“What does the guy do at every rally?” White said at the Charlotte event. “He puts his hands in the air and does his dance moves to the unofficial gay national anthem, for crying out loud.”
White then recorded the smattering of attendees who swayed to the song and promised to share it with the former president.
Marla Maples said gays and lesbians should vote for her ex-husband Trump because he was there with her and her friends when she danced on broadway. pic.twitter.com/S0suaRVhG4
Smith characterized the fight for LGBTQ+ rights as over while cleaving transgender people from the community at large.
“We are federally protected from discrimination — that is a fact. We have the right to get married. We have the right to serve openly in the military,” Smith told the 100 or so people having super fun, without mentioning Trump’s ban on transgender military service, his campaign’s hateful anti-trans ad blitz, Trump’s complicity quashing the Equality Act, and his support for openly anti-LGBTQ+ militias like the Proud Boys.
“I think that fundamentally the problems that this country are facing [sic] are far greater than any small affinity group,” Smith said not so subtly.
But it was Lara Trump who really summed up “Trump UNITY” best — by not mentioning a single LGBTQ+ issue in her caustic 25-minute speech.
“There was something nefarious” about the 2020 election, she said, and, “Right now we are in a fight of good versus evil.”
So much for Trump’s UNITY.
Of several stops scheduled for swing states on the not-so-gay roadshow, two remain for Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — events in Arizona and Nevada were canceled after “scheduling conflicts” announced by the LCR.
The abbreviated schedule follows fundraisers earlier this year organized by the LCR at Trump’s gilded penthouse in Trump Tower and his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. Those events netted Melania Trump hundreds of thousands of dollars in appearance fees paid for by undisclosed donors. The mostly middle-aged white gay men that make up the LCR ponied up thousands for the opportunity to tour the overdecorated citadels of MAGA power.
Selfies amid the garish interiors and attendees were de rigueur on Insta.
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