Sean Spicer’s new book, The Briefing: Politics, The Press, and The President, is spilling the beans on the Trump administration and one of the passages reveals what LGBTQ people have known all along. President Trump’s support for the LGBT community during his campaign was a sham.
Spicer describes the lengths the campaign went to in an effort to nullify the “Never Trumpers” that opposed his nomination. The group of moderate Republicans had signed and circulated a petition saying they would never accept Trump as the party’s delegate.
“[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 writes.
“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.”
The last holdout on the list was Robert Sinners, a delegate from DC originally bound to support John Kasich. Senior Trump communications advisor Jason Miller took the lead on finding out what Sinners wanted in exchange for supporting Trump.
Sinners said he wanted Trump to support gay rights. When Miller offered up a mention on LGBT rights during Trump’s acceptance speech, it sealed the deal.
“Jason assured Sinners that Trump would be the most ‘inclusive’ candidate the Republican Party ever had,” Spicer writes.
“This is your moment, Robert,” Miller told Sinners, according Spicer’s book. “You can deliver this.”
“Jason told Sinners Donald Trump’s acceptance speech would acknowledge the LGBT[Q] community, which no other Republican acceptance speech had done,” Spicer writes. “And it did.”
“As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology,” Trump said in his speech referencing the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando by a radical Muslim.
Since winning the election, Trump has become the worst president on LGBT rights as he panders to the evangelical right.
Under his leadership, the government has yanked nondiscrimination protections for employees, argued in court that businesses and schools can discriminate against LGBT people, erased mentions of LGBTQ people from government websites and materials, and attempted to ban transgender people from serving in the military
