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.”