AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell
Log Cabin Republicans, the largest LGBT Republican organization in the U.S., condemned Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis after his campaign posted an ad attacking former President Donald Trump’s connections to the LGBT community.
The bizarre ad, which was posted by the DeSantis War Room to Twitter on Friday, attacked Trump by playing a 2016 clip of him saying, “I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens.”
Trump made the comments following the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, which left 49 people dead. The ad also showed clips of Trump with transgender Republican Caitlyn Jenner, before boastfully displaying a string of headlines that referenced DeSantis’ “draconian” and “evil” anti-LGBT policies.
“Today’s message from the DeSantis campaign War Room is divisive and desperate,” the Log Cabin Republicans said in a statement. “Republicans and other commonsense conservatives know Ron Desantis [sic] has alienated swing-state and younger voters.”
The organization said that while “conservatives understand that we need to protect our kids, preserve women’s sports, safeguard women’s spaces and strengthen parental rights,” DeSantis’ “extreme rhetoric has just ventured into homophobic territory.”
Log Cabin Republicans warned:
Desantis’ [sic] rhetoric will lose hard-fought gains in critical races across the nation. This old playbook has been tried in the past and has failed – repeatedly. Left-wing gays have tried to hijack the equality movement by pushing their radical sex and gender policies on children while slandering anyone who disagrees with them. Ron DeSantis and his team can’t tell the difference between commonsense gays and the radical Left gays. He, sadly, sees them all the same. His naive policy positions are dangerous and politically stupid.
Charles T. Moran, the national president of the group, also condemned DeSantis in his own post.
“You could have gone after radical queers, @RonDeSantis – but instead you went after the ones who win the @GOP votes and get Republicans elected. People like me,” he wrote. “Wrong fight to pick, bud.”
Log Cabin Republicans weren’t the only LGBT Republicans to condemn DeSantis over the ad.
“This is undeniably homophobic,” tweeted Trump’s former acting Director of National Intelligence, Richard Grenell, while Caitlyn Jenner, in a since-deleted post, suggested that DeSantis had “just lost any chance at 2028.”