At the Trump Pride event in Florida, Richard Grenell spoke alongside Donald Trump's daughter, Tiffany Ariana. The only thing the openly gay, albeit former, member of the Trump administration said was: "Donald Trump regularly asks me: 'How do we stand with gays and lesbians?' And I tell him: 'Mr. President, gays love you!'" Grenell was acting director of the U.S. National Intelligence in 2020.
On June 1, 2020, he announced his resignation from the position. Despite not being considered for other offices, Grenell has continued to campaign for Donald Trump ever since.
At the event in Tampa, Tiffany Trump also spoke of the criticism she had faced because of her father's candidacy. "People came up to me and said, 'Tiffany, you have gay and lesbian friends. How can you support your father then?'" But the stories surrounding Donald Trump's alleged hostility toward the LGBTQIA+ community are all fabricated, Tiffany said. "People are just making it up," she assured her audience. "I would never lie to you," Donald Trump's daughter emphasized.
Numerous LGBTQIA+ rights groups have challenged Donald Trump's portrayal of himself as a champion of sexual minorities. The influential group GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) documented a total of 181 attacks by Donald Trump on the rights of gay, lesbian, and other sexual minorities. These include:
- Shortly after Donald Trump and Mike Pence took office in Washington, all references to the LGBTQIA+ community were removed from the White House website.
- In 2019, the Trump administration imposed a moratorium on recruiting transgender individuals into the U.S. military.
- Also in 2019, Donald Trump overturned a Barack Obama administration regulation that addressed discrimination against same-sex couples in adoption proceedings. The city of Philadelphia filed a lawsuit, and Trump's Attorney General, William Barr, took the case to the Supreme Court.
- In 2019, Donald Trump overturned a regulation passed by the Obama administration that targeted discrimination against same-sex couples in adoption proceedings. In 2020, the Trump administration decided to eliminate protections for transgender people in homeless shelters. Under the new regulations, shelters are allowed to assign people to accommodations based on their sex assigned at birth, not on the sex they declare.
Why should Donald Trump and his clan do anything for gays, lesbians, transgender people, and other minorities? None of them fit his image of a Christian way of life. He, who sees himself as beholden to Christian hardliners, has no interest in these "others." Richard Grenell does not speak for the gay and lesbian community. Rather, it can be assumed that he is currying favor with Donald Trump out of personal career ambition.
