Donald Trump Jr.’s call to end the boycott against Anheuser-Busch after the company paid homage to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney simply because they donated some money to Republicans led to a massive degree of justified backlash from conservatives on social media. It also put supposedly conservative supporters of his father, former President Donald Trump, in the strange position of having to turn themselves into pretzels in order to defend going soft on woke corporations just when a boycott initiated by conservatives was finally having some degree of success.
It’s certainly an odd take for a group that has spent the better part of six months portraying Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis - a likely challenger to Trump for the GOP nomination - as public enemy number one. On the one hand, DeSantis is an establishment globalist RINO on par with Jeb Bush and Paul Ryan, but on the other, he’s doing a great job as governor of Florida and needs to just wait his turn and he’ll easily get the MAGA vote in 2028. Or we could go with the latest Trump narrative, which seems to be that DeSantis’ policies made Florida the “worst state,” or something. Hey, whatever works, right?
So, which is it? To them, it doesn’t really matter. Everyone, including Donald Trump, knows full well that the popular Florida governor is the only person standing in the way of a third GOP presidential nomination. Except, these bizarre attacks seem less like any coherent political strategy and more like throwing as much sh*t against the wall as possible and hoping some of it sticks.
But what will, or should, stick in primary voters’ minds next year is the fact that Trump and many in his circle are the ones who’ve gone soft not just on woke corporations, but on transgender ideology and the leftist rainbow mafia as a whole. From all the way back in 2012, when Trump overturned a decision by his Miss Universe Organization to disqualify a Canadian transgender beauty pageant contest, to the 2016 campaign, when Trump said that transgenders should be allowed to use the bathroom of their choice, to a 2022 Pride-infused Mar-a-Lago bash celebrating the passage of Biden’s nonsensical Respect for Marriage Act, all the way to this month, when Trump actually sided with woke-Disney over DeSantis’ efforts to bring them to heel, the hits keep coming for anyone who even attempts to define Trump as any sort of social conservative.
But, apparently, pointing any of this out makes you some sort of traitor to the conservative cause, or worse. Consider this video, which includes Trump Jr.’s comments along with other examples of Trumpworld catering to this insanity and contrasts that with DeSantis’ clear comments on the issue. When I posted it to Twitter, none other than Trump’s former Acting Director of National Intelligence, Richard Grenell, called me out for supposedly “crossing the line into homophobic tropes.” Nothing I wrote was homophobic, of course, but, as a Trump defender, Grenell - by all accounts a good person and a competent administration member - felt compelled to weigh in. Except, since he couldn’t defend the actual contents of the video, he resorted to the leftist tactic of name calling and innuendo.
Referring to the exchange, Chronicles Magazine politics editor Pedro Gonzalez opined: “Like I keep saying, if you want to stop the spread of things like transgenderism, you need to defeat Trump and his circus first because they’re preventing the formation of opposition. They’re just selling you the Democratic Party’s platform from maybe five years ago.” Bingo.
Unlike Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis fully understands the dangers of transgender ideology and is willing to articulate it openly. It’s a clear contrast on one of the most important issues of our time. And anyone with half a brain inside Trump’s circle knows this, which is why they spend so much time deflecting by attempting to label DeSantis as some sort of deep state plant, Jeb Bush / Paul Ryan clone supported by George Soros. All of it is patently absurd, especially given DeSantis’ stellar record both in Congress and as governor of Florida. It’s a record they decidedly do NOT want to run against, so smears and deflection will have to do for now.
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