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This article was greatly enhanced thanks to feedback from three anonymous Politics & Gender reviewers; Lisa Beard, Marla Brettschneider, Susan Burgess, Diane Detournay, Cricket Keating, and Dara Strolovitch; as well as participants in the 2017 University of Michigan Institute for Research on Women and Gender Conference, “Opposition to the Political Participation of Women and Gender Justice Advocates,” convened by Jennifer Piscopo and Denise Walsh. Archival research for this article was funded by a 2014 Phil Zwickler Memorial Research Grant from Cornell University.
On July 26, 2017, late-night television host Stephen Colbert tweeted a doctored photo of Donald Trump's June 14, 2016, tweet, in which he wrote, “To the LGBT Community! I will fight for you while Hillary brings in more people that will threaten your freedoms and beliefs.” Colbert's screenshot of the tweet, satirically revised in the wake of President Trump's sudden reversal on allowing transgender people to serve in the military, was posted with key words crossed out to read, “To the LGBT Community! I will fight you.”
I begin here because I believe that reading Colbert's edits of Trump's tweet as a palimpsest, in which both messages are conveyed simultaneously, reveals important insights into the question of how LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) politics has changed in the context of what political scientist Robert Lieberman and his coauthors (2017, 9) refer to as “Trumpism,” or “a political orientation that challenges the interlocking liberal commitments to a relatively interventionist state, economic openness, cultural and political pluralism, and internationalism.” By claiming to protect the LGBT community from threats—the presumably “radical Muslim terrorist” in the wake of the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in June 2016—the initial tweet by then–presidential candidate Trump illustrates what has become politics as usual under Trumpism: a continuation of nativism (and complimentary isolationism) that extends from Trump's eight-year “birther” campaign against Barack Obama and the simultaneous leveraging of political outsider status as an appeal to the rhetoric of resentment that is embedded in contemporary populism (Bessire and Bond 2017; Lieberman et al. 2017; Tabachnick 2016).
Moreover, in Trump's tweets, the positioning the “LGBT community” as unconditionally embraced by U.S. democratic norms, such as equality and liberty, in relation to the vague threat of terrorist outsiders provides a succinct...