How far should Donald J. Trump – or any candidate – have to bend to the special demands of certain interest groups or ethnicities to increase his electability?
It’s a question Democrats are desperately hoping to solve over on the other side of the electoral spectrum as well, with liberals experiencing frustration after frustration with normally reliable voter blocs this year threatening to change course and possibly abandon president senile Joe Biden and Democrat congressional candidates over grievances x or y – or simply because the bumbling old dolt himself is too incompetent and compromised that they no longer believe in his viability to carry on another term.
Opinion polls and surveys tend to focus on Biden himself as the source of these groups’ discontent, though it should be pointed out that senile Joe’s bullpen of Democrat backups are at least as bad as he is – or worse – and that simply removing the doddering Delawarean from the 2024 equation wouldn’t bring about the desired relief. Democrats, as a party, have slowly morphed into a conglomeration of evil defenders (abortion on demand, Palestinian/Hamas appeasers and sympathizers), fantasy pursuers (“climate change”), hopeless tyrants (vaccine mandates and gas stove banners), open borders advocates (Mr. Biden, tear down that wall!) and culture destroyers (Title IX changers, “woke” advancers, etc.) that the rot extends down well below the surface.
Make no mistake, Biden is awful. But senile Joe is just the most visible aspect of the utter deterioration in principles and values that have driven many of the Democrats’ strong backers into the Republican camp, specifically due to the populist realization and policies of Trump himself. From the outset of his 2016 campaign, Trump didn’t settle for offering his pitch to establishment Republicans and conservatives alone. No, he’s gone for the Democrats’ proverbial jugular by aggressively identifying and targeting Democrat voter blocs – and then keeping up the pursuit where others gave it lip service and eventually quit.
One such Democrat bloc is the so-called LGBTQIA+++ collection of non-traditionalists, the stereotypical cultural non-conformists who’ve found comfort and pandering from the anything-goes Democrats. In this sense, how far should Trump go to win some of them over?
In an article titled “Push on to get Trump half of LGBT vote”, the always useful for a good scoop Paul Bedard reported at the Washington Examiner:
“While Democrats sneer at talk that Trump deserves votes from gay people, many in the community said his support before the 2016 election and as president demonstrates he is not the enemy often described in the media.
“[Log Cabin Republican president Charles] Moran said that was made clear during the Republican National Convention in 2016, when Trump featured prominent gay businessman Peter Thiel’s onstage endorsement. Moran said Trump ‘made it OK for gays to be open’ about being Republican. Now, he said, it is time to remind voters about Trump’s support through a broad campaign that includes digital ads, get-out-the-vote walks, rallies, and ballot efforts.
“[Richard] Grenell, the first-ever gay man named to a Cabinet post and Trump’s first ambassador to Germany, will help Log Cabin Republicans lead that effort. Top Trump gay allies, including philanthropist Bill White and his activist husband Bryan Eure, are also major players and fundraisers.”
You know what’s surprising about this? That it’s not surprising that Trump has initiated an effort among a typical Democrat voter bloc to try and weaken the hold the liberal party has supposedly always enjoyed where they’re concerned. There are gay liberty-lovers just as there are gay liberals.
The question being how far Trump, or any Republican, should go towards wooing an interest group that comes to the negotiating table with a set of inflexible demands that won’t be altered no matter what he promises or how he words his “support” for them.
I suppose, in the end, it also depends on what going after the gay vote portends. Just as it must be noted that not every African-American, Hispanic, Asian, Jewish or Muslim voter thinks the same, self-labeled gay voters don’t join together as a united intellectual group to determine what they, as an identifiable whole, really want from their political leaders.
Perhaps it’s the way the establishment media portrays it, but gay voters are usually depicted in popular culture as those who went to last year’s White House “Pride celebration”, where a number of more-than-happy multi-gender participants took the chance to expose their surgically enhanced physiques to demonstrate how enthused they were for the president of the United States presenting them a platform to “strut their stuff”.
Many folks, myself included, were more than offended that the president expanded the notion of freedom of expression to include tasteless sexual grandstanding, the type of thing that’s not suitable for children and shocking to the point where decent society begs for explanations as to why this crap should be sanctioned by taxpayers in the first place. “Why am I paying for that?” “Why am I footing the bill to champion deviancy?” Serving in Hollywood, Ronald Reagan certainly knew a healthy number of ‘gay’ people – why didn’t he go out of his way for ‘Pride’ then?
Believe it or not, there are at least a measurable percentage of white male evangelical Christians who vote for Democrats, too. We personally know an awful lot of – far, far too many, in fact – Lutherans who don’t give a hoot about Bible teachings so as to outwardly advocate leftist “woke” causes, including “gay” and “transgender” and non-binary (whatever that means) beliefs. These people, if you can indeed lump them together, will not be voting for Trump in November if their Facebook profiles and posts are any indication.
This is but one example of what I see as the gay vote, and it would be an utter waste of time to invest hours and resources into going and speaking to them about leaving abortion up to the states or how Trump’s MAGA agenda will mean lower inflation and more America-first foreign policy which will strengthen this country’s trade position vis-a-vis China and the rest of the world.
So it should be said that going after the gay vote doesn’t really engender much more – or less – than it would be to try and win votes from ethnicities or religious entities, or unions or certain single issue voters, though these types appear to be fewer and fewer for subjects other than abortion.
Political set-asides don’t work for “groups” within the totality of the MAGA agenda. MAGA doesn’t discriminate just as it doesn’t provide preferences for anyone other than the average ordinary American to enjoy the Pursuit of Happiness through God-given gun rights, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, due process, voting or any other guarantee from the Constitution or the voluminous federal statute books.
At the same time, conservative gay voters want the same things that any other conservative would want, namely to be protected from excessive state searches, privacy, protection from government bureaucratic discrimination or deep state targeting, and a strong military focused on readiness and absence of emphasis on turning the armed forces into the left’s laboratory for social experimentation.
The hiccups tend to show themselves when gay folks talk about “equality” in terms of marriage and treatment under the law that much of the radical leftist agenda was based upon for, well, a long, long time. Homosexuality in Hollywood, for example, was considered taboo for decades, the subject turning somewhat during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980’s and 1990’s, stigmas brought on and fanned mainly by the leftist activists themselves.
Conservatives resisted the onslaught of same-sex marriage, and it’s my impression that gay Republican groups aren’t asking religious conservatives to change their beliefs as much as they’re requesting that Republicans accept that same-sex marriage is here to stay as all-but sanctioned by Supreme Court decisions and codifying the concept in Congress and many state legislatures. Republican politicians wouldn’t get far by calling for a constitutional marriage amendment or to repeal various laws that address the subject. This doesn’t mean social conservative groups should give up the fight, but they also should see reality and the political direction of Americans, large majorities of which have moved on from the marriage question.
By looking to gay groups for votes, Trump does run the risk of further alienating the most traditional religious conservative organizations and their members. Trump must balance the potential dampening of enthusiasm in his base, just as he must have wondered what the reaction would be when he announced his “Let the states decide” abortion position several weeks back.
There are no winners here. Trump will lose some votes – a few – the mystery is whether he’ll gain enough to make up for it. I don’t think it hurts Trump to openly seek gay votes as long as his pitch is, as was Melania Trump’s in Bedard’s article, based on “unity” and a standard pro-American message that doesn’t imply that the second Trump administration will be tossing goodies and privileges to leftist radicals who hate the country – and himself.
Besides, what does “equality” mean, anyway? It primarily connotes that all Americans will be treated the same under the law and won’t be singled out by external characteristics for special suspicion or unfair and unearned scrutiny by the government simply because of “what” they are.
I always told my kids that it was okay to like or dislike a person because of “who” they are but not because of “what” they are. Not the same thing.
The Trump campaign is working overtime to not only nail down support from “base” conservative and Republican groups, but also make inroads into the Democrats’ usual backers to pick up the crucial “middle” ballots he’ll need to win this year’s election. The MAGA tent has more than enough space to incorporate gay people who love America. Just don’t push the special treatment too far, Mr. Trump.
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