Trump’s support in the LGBT community is small but nonetheless considerable. An estimated 20 percent of registered LGBT voters plan to vote for the billionaire businessman, according to a NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll conducted in September, while 80 percent are voting for Clinton. That’s roughly in line with, if a bit smaller than the LGBT support for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney back in 2012 (23 percent), John McCain in 2008 (27 percent) and George W. Bush in 2004 (23 percent).
These static numbers might suggest that conservative voters in the LGBT community are merely diehards who will vote for any Republican candidate, no matter how dangerous or destructive their beliefs are. During the Republican National Convention in July, the GOP unveiled the most virulently anti-LGBT platform in its history. [...]
The key to Trump’s LGBT appeal isn’t just ticket loyalty. As his party moves to the far right, the CEO has been falsely billed as an ally to the LGBT community. Although the Log Cabin Republicans opted not to support Trump because of his ties to anti-gay zealots like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Rick Santorum, the organization’s president, Gregory T. Angelo, said that Trump could be the “most pro-LGBT president that this country has ever had.” [...]
Trump isn’t the compassionate conservative you’re looking for. But what he has done — and very successfully, one might say — is to use the LGBT community to drum up support for his plan to place American Muslims in a Third Reich-style registry.
During the Republican National Convention, Trump became the first GOP presidential nominee to ever mention the LGBT community in his acceptance speech. That act wasn’t a benevolent one: He exploited the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting — in which a lone gunman killed 49 people, while injuring 53 more, in a Florida gay bar — by connecting it to radical Islamic terror.
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