Easy Marks

I just saw an MSNBC panel talk about how Trump is moderating the Republican stance on LBGT rights. This is insane.

I assume this is the passage of the speech that they’re talking about:

Only weeks ago, in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist. This time, the terrorist targeted our LGBT community. As your President, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBT citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology. To protect us from terrorism, we need to focus on three things.

As delivered, he twice added a “Q” to “LBGT,” and also pronounced the acronym like he was shitting an anvil. He also congratulated the audience for cheering.

Anyway, it’s nice that he’s using up-to-date terms, but the substance of what he’s saying here is that he’s opposed to gay and lesbian people being killed en masse. CONGRATULATIONS! He also has the courage to oppose ISIS and then offers a stupid, unspecific non-plan for combating them.

What are the other Republican policies on LBGT rights? Well, it involves lots of prejudice and discriminatory legal disabilities. It proposes overturning Obergefell and denying same-sex marriage rights to people in a majority of the states, opposing new federal antidiscrimination provisions and rolling back the ones that exist, making adoption by same-sex parents more difficult, and making conversion therapy for minors legal. Trump did not suggest that he opposes any of these policies, and his vice presidential candidate strongly supports them.

And yet, our nominally more liberal news network portrays this speech as some sort of sign that the Republican Party is becoming more tolerant, while also working to normalize the white nationalist authoritarianism of the speech. It’s astounding, and one of the reasons that Trump has a non-zero chance of winning.