Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said former President Donald Trump’s support for LGBTQ policies is “fair game” despite blowback, even from some on the right.
In an interview Wednesday with Tomi Lahren of the conservative website Outkick.com, DeSantis stood by the release of a video last week by the Twitter account DeSantis War Room, which is identified as the rapid-response team for the Republican governor.
“I think identifying Donald Trump as really being a pioneer in injecting gender ideology into the mainstream – where he was having men compete against women in his beauty pageants – I think that’s totally fair game because he’s now campaigning saying the opposite, that he doesn’t think that you should have men competing in women’s things like athletics,” DeSantis told Lahren.
Video Tweeted By DeSantis War Room:
“We’ve been very clear on it,” he added, “that we believe in protecting the rights of our girls and the rights of women athletes to be able to participate with fairness and with integrity.”
“Ultimately, when you talk about some of the gender ideology that’s being unleashed in this country, in the state of Florida we are fighting back against that,” DeSantis continued.
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“It’s just a fundamental issue. I think it’s an attack on women’s rights more broadly to say that gender is fluid and I also think it’s an attack on the truth itself.”
The governor then cited the fawning praise from the left for Lia Thomas, the biological man who swam for the University of Pennsylvania and then claimed he was a woman, and racked up numerous awards and championships competing against biological women.
“There’s value in making sure our society is rooted in truth, and not in social fad,” said DeSantis.
The DeSantis’ camp attack on Trump for his LGBTQ politics came on the last day of Pride Month.
In one tweet, DeSantis War Room posted photos of the U.S. embassies in Austria, Canada, India and South Korea flying the Pride flag or being bathed in rainbow-colored light.
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The account also posted the 73-second video that juxtaposed Trump’s pro-LGBTQ stance — “I’ll do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens,” Trump said in one clip — with DeSantis’ policies to keep LGBTQ activism out of schools, his efforts to ensure women can attend the restroom free of biological men, and preventing children from attending sexually provocative drag queen shows.
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