Even as the New York Times assured us last year that Trump's "More Accepting Views on Gay Issues Set Him Apart in G.O.P." and the Washington Post observed he was "Teaching the GOP a Different Way to Embrace Gay Rights," LGBTQ Americans knew exactly what was coming.
Now, we have a Supreme Court justice who has already gone out of his way to target the high court's 2015 marriage equality decision, a Justice Department that's going out of its way to block nondiscrimination protections of gays under federal law, and a pr*sident who is trying to turn back the clock on the ability of transgender Americans to openly and honestly put their lives on the line for their country.
But how—how?—you ask, did mainstream reporters get it so wrong? Because they were reporting from a mindset and political culture that was a decade behind the times. In the '90s and early aughts, Democratic politicians used to score points by saying nice things about lesbians and gays even though they had almost completely failed to make any pro-LGBTQ advances at the federal level. That empty positive rhetoric was generally rewarded precisely because so many fire-breathing Republicans were busily scoring their own points by demonizing gays.
But after Obama was elected, LGBTQ activists and donors finally said, "Enough! You don't get points for being an ally unless you produce." The Obama administration and Democrats produced—a lot, given how far legal advancements for queer Americans had languished behind the culture.
But during Trump's candidacy, mainstream reporters applied a distinctly 2008 political mindset to a Republican candidate who, on the surface perhaps, sounded different. Nice talk was good enough, even revolutionary, as they framed it. They didn't bother to look at the obvious train wreck in the making when, for instance, Trump made anti-gay crusader Mike Pence his choice for VP or promised right-wing conservatives he would nominate Supreme Court justices to overturn the landmark Obergefell ruling.
Speaking as someone who has spent a decade reporting on LGBTQ rights, let me say this: Activists were never fooled by Donald Trump's hollow promises of support on the campaign trail.
Trump's favorite moments to pledge his supposed loyalty to LGBTQ Americans on the stump almost always came when he could use the issue as a cudgel against another minority, particularly Muslims. After the Pulse Nightclub shooting last year, for instance, he immediately launched a tweet using the tragedy to justify his call for a Muslim ban. The following day, he laced a speech that primarily promoted harsher terrorism and immigration policies with nearly a dozen "LGBT" and "gay" references. He also explicitly pitted Muslims and gays against each other.
“A radical Islamic terrorist targeted the nightclub,” Trump said on June 13, 2016, “not only because he wanted to kill Americans, but in order to execute gay and lesbian citizens because of their sexual orientation.”
In the same speech, Trump failed to make even one mention of Latinos, who represented the vast majority of the people who perished in that Orlando tragedy. Why? He couldn't afford to cast Latinos as the rightful victims of the massacre because he had built his campaign on a foundation of anti-immigration, anti-Latino smears since Day One of his candidacy.
As I wrote following the speech: “QUIT USING OUR TRAGEDY TO LAUNCH HATEFUL RHETORIC AGAINST MUSLIMS OR ANY OTHER MINORITY.”
Mainstream reporters ignored plenty of warning signs that betrayed exactly how harmful Trump’s governance would be to the cause of equality. Now they are finally catching up to what a total disaster Trump is to the LGBTQ freedoms that have just recently begun to be codified into law.
The media committed many sins during the 2016 election cycle. One of them was reporting on LGBTQ issues as if nothing had happened since 2008. Friendly rhetoric is only worth something when you have no rights to lose, and that was essentially the case at the federal level a decade ago. But now it no longer matters whether you're a Republican or a Democrat who talks a good game. If your actual policies are clearly going to destroy the legal foundation that is being laid for LGBTQ equality, you're exactly the disaster that Trump has turned out to be.