LGBTQ conservatives say they feel misled by DeSantis

LGBTQ Republicans say they feel misled by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) after the GOP presidential hopeful’s “war room” shared a bizarre video widely seen as inflammatory.

The video bashed former President Donald Trump’s (R) support for the LGBTQ community and leaned into conservative state policies passed under DeSantis this year that were criticized as anti-LGBTQ.

LGBTQ conservatives, reacting to the video, said DeSantis had shown his true colors as an “anti-LGBT champion,” undermining his arguments that his support for the policies were about protecting children and parents’ rights.

“It’s like he’s going mask off,” said Brad Polumbo, a Michigan-based libertarian journalist. “The cat’s out of the bag.”

Polumbo said he’d have considered voting for DeSantis at one time.

“I’m somebody who has my fair share of policy disagreements with DeSantis, but I was considering voting for him in the primary before he entered the race officially,” he said. “Since then, he’s done thing after thing that really makes me increasingly write off that possibility.”

Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), who has endorsed Trump for president but vocally supported Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill on the campaign trail last year, said that in light of Friday’s video, he now feels that he was “used” and misled by DeSantis.

“I used to think he was a great governor,” Santos, the first non-incumbent gay Republican elected to Congress, said of DeSantis. “Now, I’m starting to think differently.”

The video shared Friday — the last day of LGBTQ Pride Month — by the “DeSantis War Room” Twitter account features footage of Trump at the Republican National Convention in 2016 saying he would “do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens.”

Trump’s remarks were made in response to a mass shooting that had occurred just weeks earlier at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that was at the time the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. It remains the deadliest incident of violence against LGBTQ people in the nation’s history.

The video, originally posted by @ProudElephantUS, a pro-DeSantis Twitter account, also features old clips of Trump saying he would be OK with transgender women competing in the Miss Universe pageant, which he owned when he made the comments in 2012, and would be comfortable with Caitlyn Jenner, the former Olympic decathlete who came out as transgender in 2015, using the restroom of her choice at Trump Tower.

The video then cuts to images of DeSantis overlaid with headlines that the Florida governor signed “the most extreme slate of anti-trans laws in modern history” and a “draconian anti-trans bathroom bill.”

The ad also features images of shirtless men and several celebrities, including actor Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in the film “American Psycho,” about a young investment banker who leads a double life as a gruesome serial killer.

DeSantis, like other conservatives who have championed similar policies, has defended his signature on legislation to remove lessons about sexual orientation and gender identity from Florida classrooms and ban transgender women and girls from female sports and restrooms by invoking the protection of children and women’s spaces.

But Friday’s video left some on the right, including Polumbo, wondering if that’s true.

“It’s all about how you frame it,” Polumbo, who is openly gay, said of policies that may be viewed as anti-LGBTQ.

On the one hand, he said, conservative lawmakers may argue that, by supporting policies like Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill — known to its critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill for its heavy restrictions on talk of LGBTQ identities in public school classrooms — they are merely working to protect children from being exposed to inappropriate materials at school.

On the other hand, more extreme Republicans may say they endorse such policies because they do not believe in or support LGBTQ people.

“I thought at first he was doing the former,” Polumbo said of DeSantis, “but ads like this make me think he’s the latter.”

Santos, the New York Republican who backed the “Don’t say gay” legislation, also suggested his opinion of DeSantis had turned because of the video.

“I still stand by the bill in its nature, but now it seems that it had a more perverse agenda behind it,” he said, later adding that “I’m starting to see [DeSantis] for what he is. His rhetoric is to diminish and remove rights away from people like myself, and I can’t support that.”

Yvonne Dean-Bailey, a former Republican state legislator from New Hampshire, said her plans to back DeSantis as the GOP nominee in 2024 were dashed by Friday’s video, which she said solidified her already-waning support for the Florida governor’s campaign.

“This was the final nail in the coffin,” said Dean-Bailey. “At this point, I can’t see myself voting for DeSantis.” She said she is likely to vote for a third-party candidate in 2024.

Dean-Bailey, who is openly gay, said she was initially drawn to DeSantis’s candidacy by his criticism of pandemic-era lockdowns and mask mandates and his plans for the economy.

“He really set himself apart as like, this future of the Republican Party,” she said. “This is somebody who can really kind of cross the political divide and work on those issues that are important.”

“He’s since led this conversation on the culture war that is so unattractive to me,” Dean-Bailey added. “I don’t even want to call myself a conservative anymore. I don’t identify with these people.”

If the intent of Friday’s video was to make Trump seem less palatable to Republicans, it very likely backfired, said Jennifer Williams, a Republican who in January became the first transgender woman elected to a municipal council in New Jersey.

“Ultimately, it’s going to help a lot of moderate Republicans,” said Williams, who added that she personally did not feel misled by the DeSantis video.

Williams added that she’s been disappointed by the extreme and harmful rhetoric surrounding LGBTQ issues — and transgender issues, in particular — coming from DeSantis and other GOP 2024 frontrunners, including Trump.

“I never would have expected that going into 2024 transgender people, in particular transgender women, would be a more important issue than defeating China on the world stage … or fulfilling all the many promises that were made at the beginning of COVID.”

“None of those are major issues they’re discussing,” Williams added. “They’re worried about what’s in someone’s pants, and how someone wants to be happy in their life. And I have to ask, how American is that? And how Republican is that?”

This story was updated at 10:06 a.m.