Vice President Kamala Harris wins the popular vote overwhelmingly, but Donald Trump prevails again in the Electoral College. Emboldened MAGA followers take to the streets to commemorate Trump’s victory. They’re met by a broad coalition of angry Harris supporters fighting for “fundamental freedoms” and protesting the will of the people denied. Riots follow. Biden calls out the National Guard to quell the violence — it escalates and spreads. Harris certifies the Electoral College vote in a locked-down Capitol. Trump, inaugurated in a “peaceful” transfer of power at a barricaded White House, makes good on his promise to be a dictator on Day One and unleashes the military on U.S. citizens.
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If that sounds impossible, consider every prediction about Trump since he descended his golden escalator in 2015, dragging the American public down with him into an electoral abyss.
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And still, Trump haunts our politics.
Days before the 2024 election, as the wannabe authoritarian, sexual predator, and doddering racist struggles to open the door to a garbage truck, he inexplicably remains a threat to American democracy. The polls, as though collectively hedging their bets, show a neck-and-neck race against the alternative.
He might just pull it off.
But like the dizzying number of permutations a victory or loss in the seven swing states will mean on Election Night, it’s impossible to predict the result of a Trump victory, in particular for the LGBTQ+ community.
“Ever since 2016, I have not trusted my perceptions of what the U.S. electorate will do in presidential elections. I don’t know what to expect,” says Marc Robert Stein, a professor and historian of U.S. law at San Francisco State University who specializes in gender, race, and sexuality.
If Trump does prevail, the past is prologue, Stein says.
“In some respects, LGBTQ people in the United States before the 1970s lived in a police state, vulnerable to state power, legal and extralegal policing, and denied basic rights. That doesn’t mean that we lived under fascism, but it provides some clues about what LGBTQ people might justifiably fear about living under a fascist president.”
We’ve already seen the former president in action, banning trans service members from the military in his first term, pushing religious exemptions to LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination measures, his opposition to the Equality Act, his rollback of Obama-era protections for LGBTQ+ people, draconian cuts to HIV/AIDS prevention efforts and throwing up barriers to adoption and surrogacy for same-sex couples.
Those same efforts and more have been pushed by Trump’s administration in exile, including hundreds of lawsuits filed by the architect of his first-term immigration policies — and a future propaganda minister in a Trump 2.0 — Stephen Miller, with his America First Legal group going after “woke” corporations and school systems over LGBTQ+-inclusive policy, and in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which promises a dictatorial “unitary executive” to enact a “biblically-based” theocratic regime.
“We would likely see not only official neglect, à la Reagan and AIDS, but also bans on LGBTQ-affirmative education, including sex education; elimination of government support for LGBTQ health initiatives, community centers, historical research projects, and historical landmarking; and a return to anti-LGBTQ immigration restrictions,” Stein says.
“Trump and his team have drawn and would draw a great deal from traditions of foreign policy isolationism, economic protectionism, the imperial presidency, and the growth of executive power,” he says. An effort to demonize the LGBTQ+ community would take lessons from “the nexus of social, religious, and moral conservatism” that extends all the way from the Moral Majority and Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign in the 1970s to Moms for Liberty’s and Ron DeSantis‘ Don’t Say Gay crusade today.
A veteran of those culture wars agrees.
“LGBTQ people – especially transgender people – will be used as the leading scapegoat to continue to drive a wedge between children and young people and a parent’s ability to support gender-affirming care,” says Elizabeth Birch, former chair of the board of directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and executive director of the Human Rights Campaign from 1995 to 2004.
We’ve already seen that tactic in Trump’s third campaign, as transgender people are used as a cudgel in a massive ad campaign to describe Democrats as radical.
“This particular brand of election season LGBTQ scapegoating is the latest in a long series of issues, from depicting homosexuals as predators to discriminatory ballot initiatives to military service to marriage equality and on and on,” Birch says.
But, she adds, “The stakes here are more consequential and acute — outside of AIDS — than we have seen in many decades. We are seeing the still-early stages of fascism.”
Birch says an authoritarian Trump presidency would bring a purge of LGBTQ+ people from the government.
“My perspective is we have not been here before unless you think of the Lavender Scare of the 1950s. This is the 1950s at scale,” she says.
That era in history, Stein points out, was overtly hostile to LGBTQ+ people. The moral panic over gay people serving in the military, State Department, and throughout the government portrayed them as security risks on par with Communists allegedly infiltrating the government, seen in the parallel Red Scare led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his gay lieutenant Roy Cohn, later a mentor to Donald Trump.
How far Trump could go down that road depends in part, Stein says, on what happens with congressional elections.
“If Trump were to win, we would have a fascist president and a Supreme Court that is not only conservative but fascist-enabling, judging by the Supreme Court’s recent rulings on presidential immunity, executive power, abortion rights, and more. If the Senate and House are also controlled by fascists and fascist-enablers, that’s the worst-case scenario.”
Examples of the effect of a far-right government trifecta with a sympathetic judiciary already exist in several red states that have battered LGBTQ+ rights recently, most notoriously in Florida under the leadership of another wannabe authoritarian, Gov. DeSantis, who has purged school curricula of “woke” ideology and created a climate of fear for LGBTQ+ youth, their parents and teachers with his signature Don’t Say Gay legislation.
“Obviously, a Donald Trump victory will put some gas in the tank of far-right extremists and fascists who see an umbrella of support for their far-right fascist actions,” says Zander Moricz, the youngest plaintiff in a lawsuit opposing the Don’t Say Gay bill and a founder of the youth advocacy group SEE Alliance.
It would “exacerbate far-right bases across the country and give them a feeling of security in being more racist and being more transphobic and being more homophobic, because ‘If the president of the United States can get away with it, then so can I.’”
Moricz agrees with Stein and Birch that the trans community is at the leading edge of a fascist strategy uniting their followers by demonizing the “other.”
“Donald Trump is excellent at weaponizing people’s fear against marginalized communities so that he is able to focus on issues that don’t matter instead of the ones that do, because he actually isn’t able to solve the problems that matter to American people. He has no functional experience in creating genuine policy,” Moricz says. “He is someone who exists to promote fear.”
Almost a decade of Trump’s malignant political narcissism has had a downstream effect on his generation, Moricz believes — especially for those marginalized groups of Black, brown, trans and queer young people.
“They have only ever known a political culture that specifically disenfranchises them, discriminates against them, and pushes us to the margins of societies.”
“It creates an attitude where voting feels useless, where voting feels worthless,” he says.
It’s another tactic straight out of the fascist playbook.
That political culture, earning comparisons to the worst that history has to offer, weighs heavily on Stein.
“Even if Trump loses, Congress certifies those results, and the Supreme Court does not accept a Trump appeal, we are still going to wake up the next day to the sad reality that nearly fifty percent of the electorate, and perhaps fifty percent of the country, supported and support him,” Stein says of Trump. “Those are our neighbors, our family members, our employers, our employees, the people we see on the street, everyone around us. I can sometimes be optimistic, but I am despairing about that reality.”
For Birch, the specter of a Trump return to the White House “feels different.”
Politically, “it’s far more dangerous,” she said. “Rather than just using LGBTQ people and their lives as a tool of political division, now we are seeing a candidate stating openly he will hunt down his political opponents — perhaps not at the top of the list, but if he wins, there will be a wall of backlash that builds for many years.”
Birch stopped short of imagining the worst.
“But he is not going to win,” she predicted. “Kamala is going to win.”
For the young activist Moricz, contemplating a Trump win means focusing on the resistance already underway in his state’s laboratory of democracy.
“The context in which that organizing will be done does change significantly,” he says. “But I think what’s important to understand is that no matter who is in charge, the mechanisms that have worked for the queer and trans communities, the strategies that we have built together, the perseverance, the resilience that are innate in our community — that will stay the same regardless. And that is what should hold hope out for people, because there’s so much to be done.”
“What we have to understand is that our young people are not going to become discouraged or become heartbroken by a Trump victory,” says Moricz. “We, like their bases, will be ignited by it.”
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