In Europe, anti-LGBT rights and homophobic political positions are often masked or disguised – perhaps less and less – if only to get around anti-hate laws. In the United States they are one step ahead, and homophobic politicians are beginning to show off their intolerance.
Donald Trump’s main rival towards the Republican primaries for the 2024 presidential elections; The governor of Florida and promoter of the most extreme laws and measures against trans youth or education on gender and racism, as well as against abortion and immigrants, Ron DeSantis, has just messed it up once again in this field by broadcasting a video campaign where “the real wolf” is proclaimed against the LGTBI community.
The spot, posted on Twitter, begins with attacks on Trump for trying to protect these people, as if that were a dirty sin. The accusation is also basically false, with the exception of some past gestures by the former president that he himself has rectified time and time again with his own attacks on gays, lesbians and especially trans people.
The video specifically rescues images of Trump at the 2016 Republican national convention, when he assured that “he would do everything in his power to protect our LGTBI citizens.” At that time, in the middle of the campaign for that year’s elections, the former president was promising protection against attacks such as the one that had taken place weeks before at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where a terrorist killed 49 people in which in that time was the deadliest shooting in the country’s history.
DeSantis now reproaches the leader both for those verbal promises to protect gays and for the fact that around that same time he distributed T-shirts with the inscription “LGBTQ for Trump”, among other gestures of rapprochement to said community by the former president.
Everyone in the US knows to what extent the ex-president was drifting towards a retrograde discourse, particularly in the face of gender transition operations and trans athletes. For his opponent, however, his compassionate past is a stain that should be highlighted.
After the attack against the soft Trump, the controversial propaganda ad presents a DeSantis who “does not care” what they say about his laws and actions against the group in question. And he alternates images of the governor himself, one with lightning bolts coming out of his eyes, with headlines of when he “signed the most extreme list of anti-trans laws in modern history” or signed into law a “draconian anti-trans bathroom bill.”
Photos of the leading man are then combined, in startling association, with alpha males as diverse as Christian Bale’s killer from American Psycho; Brad Pitt’s version of Achilles in Troy, and The Wolf of Wall Street played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Then, a sign alludes to the arrival of a “real wolf”, immediately represented by a DeSantis meme with fangs.
The so-called “quick response account” of the Desantis campaign posted the video on Twitter with the following text criticizing LGTBI celebrations and Trump: “To conclude ‘Pride Month’, let’s listen to the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate.”
The video sparked pushback from prominent moderate rightists, including those from Log Cabin, which bills itself as the “largest Republican organization in the country dedicated to representing LGBT conservatives.”
“DeSantis’ message is divisive and desperate. Republicans and other common-sense conservatives know that he has left out younger and swing-state voters,” Log Cabin officials said. They added: “DeSantis’ naive political positions are dangerous and politically stupid.”
The spokesman for Trump’s election team, Steven Cheung, countered that the video is part of “a desperate campaign by DeSanctus (sic), with a candidate in his last throes.”
Fellow Republican Richard Grenell, Trump’s former director of national intelligence and the first openly gay presidential cabinet member, called the ad “homophobic, without a doubt.”
DeSantis defended the video as a tool to expose the former president as a “true pioneer” in the task, according to the far left, of “injecting gender ideology” into Republican discourse.
