With just two weeks left until the general election, Tiffany Trump cohosted a “Trump Pride” event at the Westshore Grand Hotel in Tampa, Florida this past Saturday with gay Republican diplomat Richard Grenell. But the real highlight — and, thus, the real danger — of the event was a nearly 11-minute speech that seemed calculated for peak memeability.
Set to the tune of “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas, Tiffany Trump walked onto the stage clad in a fitted pink satin dress, gold bangles, and hoop earrings. At a podium outfitted with a “Trump Pride” sign (which doesn’t even order the colors of the rainbow flag correctly), she began by insisting that her father has supported “gays, lesbians, the LGBQIIA+ community” even prior to becoming a politician. While some have framed this supposed misuse of the acronym as an innocuous accident, her exclusion of the “T” is hard to read as anything but intentional, especially in a year that has been the deadliest on record for transgender people.
In her second and final explicit reference to LGBTQ+ issues during her speech, Tiffany Trump shouted out her mother — actress and Donald Trump’s second wife, Marla Maples — in the crowd. “Back in the Broadway days, one of her best friends unfortunately passed away from AIDS,” she said. “And what I think is so powerful is when my father says there will be a cure for AIDS in the next 10 years. There will be and god bless.”
It’s notable that HIV/AIDS is the only LGBTQ+ issue explicitly mentioned in Tiffany Trump’s speech, especially when considering the White House’s actual record on the subject. In February, the Trump administration proposed major cuts to an initiative intended to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic on a global scale, which would result in hundreds of thousands of deaths every year. President Trump also falsely claimed in June that scientists had developed an AIDS vaccine.
Additionally, Vice President Mike Pence has faced continual scrutiny for an HIV outbreak among nearly 200 people in southern Indiana while he was governor. Experts have said that this was entirely preventable and happened largely because of Pence’s reluctance to implement a clean needle exchange program.
The Trump daughter’s speech, naturally, did not mention any of these factors in the supposed fight to end AIDS. In fact, the speech — which she confessed was unscripted — barely mentioned LGBTQ+ people at all, save for co-host Grenell, who is the first openly gay man to be appointed to a cabinet position. Instead, Tiffany Trump made vague statements about “love for all” and claimed that her father’s supporters face opposition because of his fight against “Big Pharma,” the tech monopolies, and the “deep state.”
