White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany falsely claimed Donald Trump was the first president to display a red ribbon on World AIDS Day after being pressed about his erasure of LGBTQ+ people for the fourth consecutive year.
On Wednesday, Washington Blade reporter Chris Johnson questioned McEnany during a press briefing about why the president chose to ignore the LGBTQ+ community in a statement released on Tuesday to honor the annual observance. As them. previously reported, Trump’s official proclamation referred to HIV/AIDS as a “deadly disease [which] disproportionately affects racial and ethnic minorities,” but he did not mention that gay and bisexual men, as well as transgender women, remain disproprtionately affected by the ongoing epidemic.
“The president included a reference to racial and ethnic minorities,” Johnson asked, “so why not LGBTQ people?”
McEnany maintained that Trump’s statement was appropriate and added that the incumbent is the first POTUS to honor those lost to HIV/AIDS by hanging a two-story red ribbon in front of the White House. “The president honored World AIDS Day yesterday in a way that no president has before, with the red ribbon there,” she said, “and I think that he commemorated the day as he should have.”
There’s one problem with that claim, though: It’s not true. According to Politico, the display dates back to the George W. Bush White House, which hung first the ribbon in 2007 at the urging of his associate director of communications, Steven Levine, who is an openly gay man.
After Bush continued the tradition the following year, The American Independent, a nonprofit news organization, reports that Barack Obama put up the display at least twice: in 2009 and 2012.
Trump has displayed the ribbon on two previous occasions, in 2017 and 2019.
But what separates Trump from his predecessor is that Obama’s World AIDS Day proclamation noted the “disproportionate risk” faced by “gay and bisexual men, transgender people, youth, black and Latino Americans, people living in the Southern United States, and people who inject drugs.”
When Johnson attempted to press McEnany on the discrepancy in the Obama and Trump statements — especially given that Trump has erased LGBTQ+ people on World AIDS Day every year in office — she reportedly took a question from One America News Network instead, a pro-Trump news channel. The administration did not respond to follow up requests for comment from the Blade on Trump’s failure to recognize the LGBTQ+ community in its HIV/AIDS messaging.
The gaffe is fairly par for the course given Trump’s record on HIV/AIDS as president. Shortly after he was elected in 2017, six members of the Presidential Advisory Council of HIV/AIDS quit when he refused to restaff the Office of National AIDS Policy. Those who did not resign in protest would be subsequently fired.
Even while vowing to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2030, Trump has repeatedly pushed to slash funding for global treatment and prevention, which critics warned would cost “millions” of lives.
In contrast, President-elect Joe Biden released a statement on World AIDS Day vowing that the incoming administration “will redouble our efforts to tackle health inequities that impact communities of color, LGBTQ+ people, and other marginalized groups, including women and children.” He has also called to increase funding to programs like the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program and Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS, restaff government offices dedicated to fighting HIV/AIDS, and eradicate discriminatory laws targeting HIV transmission among sexual partners.
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