Tiffany Trump Awkwardly Courts LGBTQ Voters By Role-Playing 'Straight Girl at a Gay Bar'

Tiffany Trump started off the year as a third-year law student at Georgetown and is ending it as a wannabe gay icon. The Other Trump Daughter hosted an LGBTQ event for her father, President Trump, on Saturday in Tampa, Florida, shifting her public persona to the chaotic party girl version of her older sister, Ivanka. Just take Ivanka’s vocal fry, the huskiness of Miley Cyrus, a couple of shots of Ciroc, and the energy of a straight woman at a drag show and you’ve got Tiffany Trump’s “Trump Pride” appearance in a nutshell.

After dancing on stage to Black Eyed Peas and blowing kisses to the crowd, Tiffany got right to it, launching into an excruciating 10-minute speech about how much she and her dad love gay people.

“I know what my father believes in,” Tiffany said. “Prior to politics, he supported gays, lesbians… the LGBQIA+ community, okay?”

Tiffany forgot the “T” for “transgender,” which one might read as a calculated move given the Trump administration’s antagonism toward transgender people—an onslaught of bills have chipped away at protections for transgender people in housing, education, and health, and even banned transgender Americans from military service—or a drunken slip of the tongue.

Conveniently ignoring Trump’s anti-LGBTQ policy agenda and his record of packing federal courts with anti-LGBTQ judges, Tiffany claimed that social media is riddled with “fabricated lies” about her father and his relationship to the LGBTQ community.

“It saddens me,” Tiffany said. “I have friends of mine who reach out and they say—they make up stories—‘how do you support your father? We know you. We know your best friends are gay’… I say it’s because my father has always supported all of you, okay?”

Tiffany paired most of her talking points with a litany of head shaking and finger pointing, the kind of manufactured sass that screams, “this is what The Gays™ like, right?” Well, some of The Gays™ in the audience apparently did, even though the speech was largely absent of any actual policy agenda that would benefit real life LGBTQ Americans. The only time Tiffany ever came close was when she gave a shout out to her mother, Marla Maples—who was in the audience—and mentioned that back in Marla’s Broadway days, one of her best friends “passed away from AIDS.”

“What I think is so powerful—when my father says that he’s going to… there will be a cure for AIDS in the next 10 years, there will be, and God bless,” Tiffany said. “Like, thank you. Like, yes.”

Ultimately, Tiffany delivered the same self-centered pomp of any Trump speech, eschewing meaningful policy for petty grievances (alleging censorship from social media platforms), vapid allyship (touting Trump’s appointment of the first openly gay cabinet member), and equally vapid sloganeering (“One love!” Tiffany shouted, more than once. “Equality!”). In the Trumpverse, insisting that Donald Trump has always been cool with the LGBTQ community is enough to maintain trust. The realities of his tenure say otherwise.

But any posture at meaning was a farce from the jump: At the end of her speech, Tiffany admitted that she didn’t have any prepared remarks.

“Hopefully the Trump genes run in me and I can just go off script like my father likes to do,” Tiffany said. “And, honestly, I love it when he gets off script, don’t you?”