Politics
EXCLUSIVE: Biden campaign previews messaging on Trump’s threat to LGBTQ rights
Campaign warns of the dangers if the former president returns to the White House

In an exclusive interview with the Washington Blade on Thursday, officials with the Biden-Harris reelection campaign explained their strategy for reminding voters of how the rights of LGBTQ Americans were under attack during former President Donald Trump’s first term in office, while also demonstrating how and why a second term would be far worse.
The officials said the LGBTQ-focused messaging in the months ahead will be informed to a large extent by Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 881-page blueprint for Trump’s return to power that would reshape American government by advancing a Christian nationalist agenda.
“We at the campaign are using Project 2025 as an umbrella term for anything and everything that is being proposed by Trump and folks who are aligned with Trump,” an official said.
With respect to Trump’s record, he said the campaign will point out instances in which the former president, for example, opposed legislation that would have advanced LGBTQ-inclusive nondiscrimination protections, appointed judges “who continually are taking away rights,” and targeted healthcare protections “at a governmental level for LGBTQ Americans.”
A campaign memo obtained exclusively by the Blade notes that “As president, Donald Trump and his administration treated the LGBTQ+ community with contempt,” such as by:
- Opposing the legislation to guarantee nondiscrimination protections, while rolling back nondiscrimination employment protections for LGBTQ+ Americans,
- Appointing anti-LGBTQ+ judges who want to rip protections away from LGBTQ+ Americans,
- Erasing health care protections for LGBTQ+ Americans,
- Banning transgender troops from serving, and
- Attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would end protections for those with preexisting conditions.
In a second Trump term, the official said, those involved in drafting the Project 2025 document have detailed precisely how they would direct “government agencies to openly allow discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity,” imperiling “decades and decades of progress.”
The campaign memo states that, “Trump’s Project 2025 will be even worse for LGBTQ+ Americans, going beyond the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill. A second Trump presidency will make it a mission to erode LGBTQ+ Americans’ rights, and undermine their existence.” For instance, the document notes, Trump would:
- Remove nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ Americans,
- Overturn same-sex marriage and protections against anti-sodomy laws,
- Reverse Title IX to remove protections for transgender students,
- Ban and expel transgender military members,
- Book bans,
- Restrict IVF and surrogacy, and
- Appoint more extreme judges who will repeal LGBTQ+ rights
The campaign intends to show voters how the deluge of anti-LGBTQ laws that were introduced and passed at the local and state level over the past few years offer “a preview” of “what we would, unfortunately, see in a second Trump administration,” the official said.
He stressed that these laws go further than targeting the rights of LGBTQ Americans but in many cases seek “to really undermine their existence in public” — and do not constitute “one-off” issues in states like Florida, Alabama or Tennessee, but rather a blueprint for national policy that “Trump and Project 2025 would bring to Americans.”
The official added that these right-wing legislators are abetted by right-wing judges, including U.S. Supreme Court justices, who have stated their interest in challenging same-sex marriage and reviving sodomy laws that were declared unconstitutional more than 20 years ago.
The damage by Trump appointed jurists, he noted, has ranged from rulings challenging safe and effective abortion medication that has been approved for more than 20 years to overturning Covid protections for workers enforced by OSHA.
The campaign official also expressed plans to show how extreme Republican efforts to restrict medically-assisted family planning could carry devastating consequences for LGBTQ families in particular.
The Alabama Supreme Court’s extension of personhood rights to frozen embryos in a ruling last month, which portends the risk of lawsuits targeting clinics that offer in-vitro fertilization, has put elected Republicans on the defense for their support of restrictions on IVF.
“This is a real threat to how people choose to grow their families,” he said.
The false notion that Trump is progressive on ‘social issues’
Part of the work of the campaign, a second official said, will be to disabuse voters of the idea that Trump, perhaps because he is from New York, or because has been married multiple times and has previously proclaimed to be pro-choice, is progressive on “social issues.”
“You have to look at his record and the people that he surrounds him with and what they want to do,” he said. “And the bottom line here is that when it comes to a lot of these issues, he has created the conditions — legally, executively, and culturally — to attack and undermine LGBTQ Americans.”
As an example, he pointed to the Trump-appointed judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals who are considering a case that could reverse a federal mandate for health insurers to cover lifesaving pre-exposure prophylaxis medications that prevent the transmission of HIV.
The first official added, “there is this false perception that Donald Trump is socially liberal, but his record and the people that he’s choosing to fill his administration, what he did as president, and what these allies and he are planning to do in a second Trump administration, go against that perception.”
For voters, he said, it can be “hard to digest all these things and some of this stuff is easier to explain than others, but that’s also why we’re making this effort in the first place” beginning with constituency papers and memos and then the campaign will “continue to hammer this message until November.”
Motivating ‘equality voters’
Since the Jan. 6 insurrection and the decision by the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority in 2022 that overturned the constitutional right to abortion first established with Roe v. Wade in 1973, the second official said, “there’s more opportunity for us to expand our electorate and reach voters that frankly are outraged by the assault on these basic fundamentals of the United States.”
“Equality voters are not just our community,” the first official said, but rather a “broad and diverse” group who constitute “a high propensity population, especially in some of these battleground [states].”
The campaign is confident that LGBTQ rights are “one of many issues that will motivate folks” to vote, he added.
In terms of the mediums through which the campaign will deliver the message, the second official noted that this involves “managing a highly personalized highly fragmented media environment in which we really have to fire on a lot more cylinders than in a traditional campaign even 10 years ago,” which was “kind of TV-heavy.”
As a result, he said, “you’re seeing a ton of different and diverse ways that we are reaching folks,” from TikTok to Truth Social, the right-wing social media platform founded by Trump, and “paid media that’s skewing heavily toward digital.”
Expect to hear from Biden
LGBTQ rights are “intimate and personal to the president,” the second campaign official said. So, on these matters “you’re going to hear from all of our principals, all of our campaign officials, especially at key moments that are high impact for LGBTQ Americans, including Pride Month.”
“This is a campaign that continues to really represent the diversity of our community, including in inner leadership,” he added.
In November, the Blade interviewed six senior LGBTQ Biden campaign officials for a series of stories about their work on the reelection effort.
Beyond highlighting the dangers presented by Trump, the campaign will continue to show LGBTQ people that Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the administration “will stand up for you and respect your dignity,” the first official said.
“That’s the contrast,” he said. “That’s the choice in this election. We’re going to highlight the history both the Vice President and the President have had supporting LGBTQ rights and implementing them as part of the Biden-Harris agenda and record.”
Biden-Harris 2024 Senior Spokesperson Kevin Munoz shared the following statement on Donald Trump’s plans to eliminate LGBTQ rights:
“The freedom-loving Republican party isn’t so free under Donald Trump’s reign. They’ve told us what we can and cannot read, who we can and cannot love, and are even telling us who we can or cannot be. Donald Trump’s Project 2025 would make it their mission to nationalize the draconian, anti-LGBTQ nightmare we’ve seen at the state level and go even further.
In Joe Biden’s America, the government works for all the American people – not just the people Donald Trump approves of. President Biden is fighting for a more equal, just future, while Donald Trump and his MAGA cronies can’t seem to even acknowledge our existence. We’ll fight in this election like our lives depend on it – because they do.”
Congress
Top Congressional Democrats reintroduce Equality Act on Trump’s 100th day in office
Legislation would codify federal LGBTQ-inclusive non-discrimination protections

In a unified display of support for LGBTQ rights on President Donald Trump’s 100th day in office, congressional Democrats, including leadership from the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, reintroduced the Equality Act on Tuesday.
The legislation, which would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, codifying these protections into federal law in areas from jury service to housing and employment, faces an unlikely path to passage amid Republican control of both chambers of Congress along with the White House.
Speaking at a press conference on the grass across the drive from the Senate steps were Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark (Mass.), U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (Wis.), who is the first out LGBTQ U.S. Senator, U.S. Rep. Mark Takano (Calif.), who is gay and chairs the Congressional Equality Caucus, U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas (N.H.), who is gay and is running for the U.S. Senate, U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.), and U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (Ore.).
Also in attendance were U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride (Del.), who is the first transgender member of Congress, U.S. Rep. Dina Titus (Nev.), U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley (Ill.), and representatives from LGBTQ advocacy groups including the Human Rights Campaign and Advocates 4 Trans Equality.
Responding to a question from the Washington Blade on the decision to reintroduce the bill as Trump marks the hundredth day of his second term, Takano said, “I don’t know that there was a conscious decision,” but “it’s a beautiful day to stand up for equality. And, you know, I think the president is clearly hitting a wall that Americans are saying, many Americans are saying, ‘we didn’t vote for this.'”
A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Sunday showed Trump’s approval rating in decline amid signs of major opposition to his agenda.
“Many Americans never voted for this, but many Americans, I mean, it’s a great day to remind them what is in the core of what is the right side of history, a more perfect union. This is the march for a more perfect union. That’s what most Americans believe in. And it’s a great day on this 100th day to remind our administration what the right side of history is.”
Merkley, when asked about the prospect of getting enough Republicans on board with the Equality Act to pass the measure, noted that, “If you can be against discrimination in employment, you can be against discrimination in financial contracts, you can be against discrimination in mortgages, in jury duty, you can be against discrimination in public accommodations and housing, and so we’re going to continue to remind our colleagues that discrimination is wrong.”
The Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which was sponsored by Merkley, was passed by the Senate in 2013 but languished in the House. The bill was ultimately broadened to become the Equality Act.
“As Speaker Nancy Pelosi has always taught me,” Takano added, “public sentiment is everything. Now is the moment to bring greater understanding and greater momentum, because, really, the Congress is a reflection of the people.”
“While we’re in a different place right this minute” compared to 2019 and 2021 when the Equality Act was passed by the House, Pelosi said she believes “there is an opportunity for corporate America to weigh in” and lobby the Senate to convince members of the need to enshrine federal anti-discrimination protections into law “so that people can fully participate.”
Politics
George Santos sentenced to 87 months in prison for fraud case
Judge: ‘You got elected with your words, most of which were lies.’

Disgraced former Republican congressman George Santos was sentenced to 87 months in prison on Friday, after pleading guilty last year to federal charges of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
“Mr. Santos, words have consequences,” said Judge Joanna Seybert of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. “You got elected with your words, most of which were lies.”
The first openly gay GOP member of Congress, Santos became a laughing stock after revelations came to light about his extensive history of fabricating and exaggerating details about his life and career.
His colleagues voted in December 2023 to expel him from Congress. An investigation by the U.S. House Ethics Committee found that Santos had used pilfered campaign funds for cosmetic procedures, designer fashion, and OnlyFans.
Federal prosecutors, however, found evidence that “Mr. Santos stole from donors, used his campaign account for personal purchases, inflated his fund-raising numbers, lied about his wealth on congressional documents and committed unemployment fraud,” per the New York Times.
The former congressman told the paper this week that he would not ask for a pardon. Despite Santos’s loyalty to President Donald Trump, the president has made no indication that he would intervene in his legal troubles.
Congress
Democratic lawmakers travel to El Salvador, demand information about gay Venezuelan asylum seeker
Congressman Robert Garcia led delegation

California Congressman Robert Garcia on Tuesday said the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador has agreed to ask the Salvadoran government about the well-being of a gay asylum seeker from Venezuela who remains incarcerated in the Central American country.
The Trump-Vance administration last month “forcibly removed” Andry Hernández Romero, a stylist who asked for asylum because of persecution he suffered because of his sexual orientation and political beliefs, and other Venezuelans from the U.S. and sent them to El Salvador.
The White House on Feb. 20 designated Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, as an “international terrorist organization.” President Donald Trump on March 15 invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which the Associated Press notes allows the U.S. to deport “noncitizens without any legal recourse.”
Garcia told the Washington Blade that he and three other lawmakers — U.S. Reps. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-Fla.), Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.), and Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) — met with U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador William Duncan and embassy staffers in San Salvador, the Salvadoran capital.
“His lawyers haven’t heard from him since he was abducted during his asylum process,” said Garcia.
The gay California Democrat noted the embassy agreed to ask the Salvadoran government to “see how he (Hernández) is doing and to make sure he’s alive.”
“That’s important,” said Garcia. “They’ve agreed to that … we’re hopeful that we get some word, and that will be very comforting to his family and of course to his legal team.”

Garcia, Frost, Dexter, and Ansari traveled to El Salvador days after House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and House Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green (R-Tenn.) denied their request to use committee funds for their trip.
“We went anyways,” said Garcia. “We’re not going to be intimidated by that.”
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on April 14 met with Trump at the White House. U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) three days later sat down with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who the Trump-Vance administration wrongfully deported to El Salvador on March 15.
Abrego was sent to the country’s Terrorism Confinement Center, a maximum-security prison known by the Spanish acronym CECOT. The Trump-Vance administration continues to defy a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ordered it to “facilitate” Abrego’s return to the U.S.
Garcia, Frost, Dexter, and Ansari in a letter they sent a letter to Duncan and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday demanded “access to” Hernández, who they note “may be imprisoned at” CECOT. A State Department spokesperson referred the Blade to the Salvadoran government in response to questions about “detainees” in the country.
Garcia said the majority of those in CECOT who the White House deported to El Salvador do not have criminal records.
“They can say what they want, but if they’re not presenting evidence, if a judge isn’t sending people, and these people have their due process, I just don’t understand how we have a country without due process,” he told the Blade. “It’s just the bedrock of our democracy.”

Garcia said he and Frost, Dexter, and Ansari spoke with embassy staff, Salvadoran journalists and human rights activists and “anyone else who would listen” about Hernández. The California Democrat noted he and his colleagues also highlighted Abrego’s case.
“He (Hernández) was accepted for his asylum claim,” said Garcia. “He (Hernández) signed up for the asylum process on an app that we created for this very purpose, and then you get snatched up and taken to a foreign prison. It is unacceptable and inhumane and cruel and so it’s important that we elevate his story and his case.”
The Blade asked Garcia why the Trump-Vance administration is deporting people to El Salvador without due process.
“I honestly believe that he (Trump) is a master of dehumanizing people, and he wants to continue his horrendous campaign to dehumanize migrants and scare the American public and lie to the American public,” said Garcia.
The State Department spokesperson in response to the Blade’s request for comment referenced spokesperson Tammy Bruce’s comments about Van Hollen’s trip to El Salvador.
“These Congressional representatives would be better off focused on their own districts,” said the spokesperson. “Instead, they are concerned about non-U.S. citizens.”
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