At his coronation in Cleveland earlier this summer, Donald Trump made history. During his acceptance speech, he did something even Reagan couldn’t. The GOP nominee broke with social conservative orthodoxy.
A risky move for any other Republican, Trump pledged “to do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens.” The crowd — made up of delegates who decidedly support traditional marriage — erupted in applause.
The convention episode should serve as a preface for the president-elect’s social issues agenda. Trump has abandoned the Religious Right and promised a laissez-faire approach to gay marriage. That should put social conservatives on edge and the gay community at ease.
But the opposite is actually occurring. The LGBT community isn’t taking the election well according to recent Gallup polling. “The percentage of LGBT adults rating their lives positively enough to be classified as “thriving,'” Gallup reports, “declined 10 percentage points after the election, from 51 percent to 41 percent.” No other demographic reported similar declines.
That depression’s likely the result of fake news that has cast Trump as second Pat Buchanan, ready to batter down bedroom doors at the head of a vice squad. The alarmism from outlets like BuzzFeed and ThinkProgress doesn’t match the record of a man who literally draped himself in the rainbow flag.
In his first interview after winning the election, Trump punted on marriage, pointing to the Obergefell decision. Asked about “marriage equality,” by 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl, Trump said he found it uncontroversial.
“It’s irrelevant because it was already settled. It’s law. It was settled in the Supreme Court,” Trump responded. “I mean it’s done … you have these cases [that] have gone to the Supreme Court. They’ve been settled. And, I’m fine with that.”
And Trump also doesn’t seem interested in meddling with bathroom executive orders. At most, he might overturn Obama’s transgender bathroom directive for public schools. In fact, Vice President-elect Mike Pence all but ushered in an era of gay federalism telling Focus on the Family’s James Dobson that the “bathroom issue can be resolved with common sense at the local level.”
More than anything the next administration seems prepared to call for a cease-fire in the culture war. And that’s a détente that never would’ve occurred had a Cruz, Rubio, or Santorum won the election. That might not be a win for the LGBT agenda but it’s not a guaranteed loss either.
Surprisingly, he’s gotten away with it. His base doesn’t seem to care. Trump remains widely popular among the evangelical foot soldiers of the religious right. In the end, his New York values didn’t bother white evangelicals, who turned out overwhelmingly for the candidate at the polls.
As Young Voices Editor Casey Given recently wrote in the Washington Examiner, “the attacks on the president-elect’s policies towards gays do not match reality.” The gay libertarian concluded that “gay rights advocates would do best at warding off attacks on the state and local levels.”
Many conservatives have made peace with an incoming executive uninterested in their social issues. Liberals, however, seem to need to find a religious right boogeyman where there isn’t one. The reactions between the Left and Right are flipped.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
