Ever since Donald Trump became the American President for the second time, he has not really tried to hide his agenda regarding the people belonging to the LGBTQ+ community. From issuing a transgender military ban to passing an executive order that proclaimed the existence of only two sexes, Trump has clearly shown that he is not the one for supporting queer people.
Now, Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s trusted press secretary has brought forth the same sentiments when she was asked about Pride month.
June is observed as Pride month all over the world and when right-wing podcaster Alec Lace asked Leavitt if Trump would do any proclamations for this month, the youngest press secretary in the history of The White House said, “There are no plans for a proclamation for the month of June, but I can tell you this president is very proud to be a president for all Americans, regardless of race, religion or creed.”
She very clearly left the word ‘pride’ out of her answer and that was all she needed to do to make the Trump government’s stance even clearer on the issues of LGBTQ+. It should be noted here that Trump did not recognize Pride month during his first presidency either and it was only in 2019 that he publicly acknowledged the month with a post on X, as was reported by NBC News.
As reported by Huffpost, “Former President Bill Clinton was the first U.S. president to officially recognize the month when he proclaimed June as Gay and Lesbian Pride Month in 1999. Former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden also commemorated the month.”
T Smith, a postdoctoral fellow in racial politics at Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts & Sciences, commented on Leavitt’s answer and told Huffpost, “The Trump administration has a long and well-documented history of signaling exactly whose lives it values, and whose it does not. The ongoing marginalization of queer and trans people — particularly Black, Brown, and Indigenous queer and trans communities — is not an unfortunate oversight. It is a deliberate feature of this administration.”
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T Smith also mentioned that the fact that Leavitt said that the American President is proud of all Americans is a blatant lie as has been clear from the way he has been treating people belonging to the LGBTQ+ community.
They said, “It does not align with Trump or his administration’s attitudes or policies in practice. The current deportation crisis, the violent targeting of immigrants, and the withholding of Palestinian, Congolese and Sudanese freedom all illustrate the same underlying truth: Only some people are viewed as ‘American’ and, therefore, categorically ‘deserving’ while others are treated as disposable.”
Another academic, Kari J. Winter, a professor of American studies at the University at Buffalo weighed in on the same topic and mentioned that the way the topic of Pride month was dealt with during the briefing on Tuesday was extremely concerning.
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Talking about the same, she said, “A sycophant asks a leading question that invites the presidential spokesperson to deliver her bit of propaganda. Alec Lace is not a journalist; he’s a podcaster hand-picked by the Trump administration to ask disingenuous rather than tough-minded questions.”
As is clear from the words of these academics and also from the action of the Trump government, the President not doing any proclamation in the month of June is a clear sign of how unsupportive this government is of the LGBTQ+ community and how they do not validate their existence.
