Trump’s last-ditch effort to recruit LGBTQ voters continues in Minnesota

• Trump is waging a last-minute battle to wins the hearts and minds of LGBTQ voters.
• On Saturday, the campaign held a “Trump pride” event in the battleground state of Minnesota.
• Supporters say the administration has made gay rights a “non-issue” and argue that Trump’s early friendships with gay men — such as Roy Cohn — show he’s always been an ally.
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Republican National Committee adviser and former cabinet member Richard Grenell on Saturday in Minneapolis praised President Donald Trump as the “first pro-gay president” — a baseless claim he has been pushing in recent weeks.

In October, Trump and his campaign sent Grenell — the country’s first openly gay cabinet member who served as the acting director of national intelligence from February to May — to a dozen “Trump Pride” events in battleground states including Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and North Carolina.

Grenell has often appeared with Tiffany Trump, but though the latest “Trump Pride” gathering Saturday in Minnesota was originally billed as featuring the president’s daughter, she didn’t make an appearance. In her place was Kimberly Guilfoyle — girlfriend to Donald Trump Jr. and senior adviser to the Trump campaign, where she oversees fundraising from major donors.  

Addressing a sparsely populated room of about 60 attendees, Grenell emphasized the Republican party as being the “pro-gay” party and claimed that Democrats now shut down the diversity of political viewpoints within the party and among LGBTQ people.

“Today, we have a cancel culture run wild by — guess who? — the gay left. They’re the first ones to scream and cancel. Yesterday’s champions of diversity are today’s intolerance,” Grenell said.

Rather than highlighting specific policy demonstrating Trump’s support for LGBTQ people, Grenell pointed towards Trump’s friendships with gay men in the ’80s, some of whom died from AIDS under the Ronald Reagan administration, he said.

“In about the 2000s, we began to have a whole bunch of support, people would come up to me, and they would give me private support,” he said. “And I started to ask people to move from private support to public support …That took a little more time, several years. And then suddenly, Donald Trump came on the scene. And he blew the doors off it. Because here’s a man that, from the ’80s, has been totally comfortable with gay men around him.”

Two large screens projected “Trump” in rainbow letters with “pride” below it — but the event failed to mention Vice President Mike Pence’s record on LGBTQ issues, which includes arguing sexual orientation is a choice, opposition to Indiana’s efforts to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, and support for religious freedom bills activists say enable discrimination against LGBTQ people.  

An organizer said attendance was being capped, presumably at the Minnesota Department of Health’s limit for indoor gatherings of 250, and temperatures were taken of each attendee prior to entry. Though the Minnesota Department of Health also requires masks for indoor events, the majority of attendees shed their masks as they mingled for about an hour before the event. 

Early on, Trump created an evangelical advisory board comprised of several openly anti-LGBTQ members

Many in the predominantly white male audience were attending with the Minnesota chapter of the Log Cabin Republicans, a national group that says it aims to advocate for LGBTQ conservatives and allies. The group has not donated to any federal candidates or PACs per The Center for Responsive Politics, but has raised close to $13,000 and has spent about $5,000 in the 2020 election cycle. In 2018, it donated around $5,000 to Republican candidates. 

Around half of the audience trended younger, including 27-year-old Zak Knudson, who said he joined the Log Cabin Republicans as a teenager campaigning for Mitt Romney in the 2012 election. 

“I’ve never seen such unprecedented support from a Republican campaign for the gay community in my life,” he said. “I mean, Romney, McCain, wouldn’t have had something like this ever — just wasn’t allowed.” 

Knudson and other attendees described a growing acceptance of LGBTQ people within the Republican party. Still, as recently as 2016, the Republican party, through then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, created an evangelical advisory board comprised of several openly anti-LGBTQ politicians and religious leaders. 

“Ric [Grenell] makes a good point that 20 years ago, they didn’t treat gays very well. And that’s fine, we can understand that. But the Democratic party didn’t support gay marriage until recently, either. So I think, you know, the country as a whole has been shifting. Trump has made it a non-issue in the party. Nobody is going out and being anti-gay,” he said, “especially in Minnesota in the Republican Party name, because you’re not going to get nominated again.”

 While parts of the Republican party appear to have shifted towards welcoming LGBTQ people, mirroring the national shift, some Republicans, such as rancher Nathan Ivie, say they continue to see anti-LGBTQ sentiment embedded within the party, according to the Associated Press.

Ivie, a county commissioner who lost his bid for re-election in a primary this summer shortly after coming out as gay in deep-red Utah, told the AP in July he’s considering leaving the party: “I want to be someplace where the things I believe in are celebrated. It’s certainly not the Democratic party. I’m becoming more and concerned it’s not the Republican party,” he said.

The series of Trump Pride events, particularly the Tampa iteration where Tiffany Trump omitted the letter “T” from LGBTQ, has drawn swift backlash from national LGBTQ advocacy groups. 

“We’re not taking the bait,” Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, told the New York Times in August. 

David also said the president’s targeted weakening of transgender rights — such as the ban on transgender service in the military, efforts within the Education Department to control which bathrooms transgender students can use, the Department of Health and Human Services rolling back health care protections for transgender patients, and the Justice Department’s decision to end protections for transgender inmates in federal prisons — marks an attempt to divide LGBTQ Americans. 

“The Trump administration is looking to drive a wedge within the LGBTQ community between the LGB and T,” he told The Times.

Transgender rights were not discussed by speakers during the Minneapolis event.

Eighteen-year-old Hannah Hawley, who says she’s an LGBTQ ally, told Business Insider her LGBTQ friends don’t understand why she supports Trump.

“A lot of my friends are LGBTQ, they’re gay, or their gender expression is different. And it’s funny to me because it’s always like, ‘Well, conservatives don’t want us to be like this. Conservatives are bad and mean and they’re not this,’ and it’s like, no, I don’t know where you’re getting that idea because I’m one of your best friends and I don’t think that way about you.” 

She said she wouldn’t have voted for any of the other Democratic candidates, but particularly doesn’t want to vote for Biden, prompting her to support Trump in her first election. 

“Y’all gotta be crazy as hell if I’m voting for Biden because of the different things that have been going on with the Democratic party, and especially with identity politics, especially concerning minorities. It’s almost like they’re exploiting minorities for votes,” she said. “And I definitely see there’s a base of diversity emerging, like this new conservative movement, that’s really for traditional American values.” 

Twenty-eight-year-old Twin Cities resident Alexander Brown says while he disagrees with Trump’s policies regarding transgender rights, he supports enough of the Republican platform to be swayed to vote for Trump, who he didn’t support in 2016.  

“As a gay male, I’ve voted Republican most of my life. I’ve always felt like the personal freedoms allow for your prosperity in life,” he said, adding, “I had no issue coming out. I mean, literally trying to tell a gay friend, or even a gay partner, who I’m voting for — that has way more discrimination that I’ve ever had in my life.”