A Google search on the phrase “divisive Donald Trump” returns nearly 16,000 results, many of them concerning his reaction to the mass shooting in Orlando, Fla. But in the aftermath of that attack, Trump did attempt to bring together two unlikely constituencies: gay voters and social conservatives.
Trump’s comments on Muslims received most of the attention as he reacted to the deadly Pulse nightclub attack. But the presumptive Republican nominee went out of his way to recognize the gay and lesbian victims of the slaughter and frame his anti-terror approach as a signal of his commitment to gay rights.
“Our nation stands together in solidarity with the members of Orlando’s LGBT community,” Trump declared. He said the attacker’s decision to “execute gay and lesbian citizens because of their sexual orientation” was “an assault on the ability of free people to live their lives, love who they want and express their identity.”
To many gay Republicans, at least, it was a watershed moment. “Trump’s speech in New Hampshire was historic — it marked the first time in history a Republican presidential nominee made a direct and explicit appeal to the LGBT community,” spokeswoman for a gay Republican organization told the Washington Examiner.
“Trump’s campaign did reach out to us in support following the attacks in Orlando, but we haven’t had the opportunity to speak with the candidate himself.”
But the Log Cabin Club was more effusive about Trump’s speech, which it hailed as part of a “tipping point in the LGBT rights movement in the United States, than when the group’s president Gregory T. Angelo complained in March that the businessman was “all over the place” on same-sex marriage.
“I have no doubt that Donald Trump would be better for LGBT Americans,” GOProud co-founder Chris Barron, who has recently been working to persuade LGBT voters to support Trump, told CNN. “Hillary Clinton wants to continue a reckless foreign policy that has made the world less safe for all Americans, including LGBT Americans.
“She can find plenty of time to crucify Christians in the U.S. for perceived anti-gay bias, but when we’ve got ISIS throwing gay people off of buildings, when we have Muslim states that are prescribing the death penalty for people who are gay, I would think this would be something that a friend of the LGBT community would be able to speak out on, and Hillary Clinton finds it unable to do so.”
That’s the message Trump has begun sending, too. “Hillary Clinton can never claim to be a friend of the gay community as long as she continues to support immigration policies that bring Islamic extremists to our country,” he said.
It’s a new take on Trump’s immigration politics, though combining support for immigration restrictions and gay rights has been more common in Europe, where Muslim arrivals have been perceived as threatening social liberalism.
But what does it mean for Trump’s relationship with social conservatives, especially evangelicals, who remain a critical voting bloc for him in November? Just two days before the Orlando attacks, Trump gave a well-received speech at a gathering of conservative Christians in Washington, D.C., organized by longtime religious right leader Ralph Reed.
“Showing up really matters, and we have not had, either at Faith & Freedom or my preceding work at Christian Coalition, a nominee show up, announced, with a full-dress speech, since George H.W. Bush in 1992,” the Examiner‘s Byron York quoted Reed as saying.
Trump had the support of 54 percent of evangelicals in a Bloomberg poll that was otherwise bad news. It was the same percentage of LGBT Americans who told Gallup they had an unfavorable opinion of him.
