The governor of Florida and candidate for the US presidency for the Republican Party, Ron DeSantis, has launched a harsh attack on his rival, former President Donald Trump, for the promise, made by the latter in 2016, to “do everything that is in my power to protect LGBT citizens”.
DeSantis, who trails Trump by 30 to 40 points in the polls, has posted a video on his campaign’s official Twitter account with the message “To close out Pride Month, let’s hear from the politician who did the most than any other Republican to celebrate…”. The video, one minute and thirteen seconds long, consists of two parts. The first starts with the videos of Donald Trump at the Republican Convention in which he promises to protect the LGTBIQ, and continues with a series of images including a “Trump Pride” t-shirt with a rainbow, also from the campaign of 2016 of the president, as well as others of the former president chatting with Caitlyn Jenner -the most famous transsexual in the United States and perhaps in the world- and defending the participation of trans in Misss Universe, the contest that Trump owned until 2015.
The second part of the video is not only related to the debate on gender, but also connects with the very Iberian (literary) genre of the grotesque. It begins with a photo of DeSantis literally shooting lightning out of his eyes, with the word No superimposed, and continues with videos of half-naked muscular men, a shot of Bradd Pitt in the movie Troy, photos of DeSantis glaring at the camera, and several media personalities from the American left (although none of them linked to the LGBT movement) expressing their terror at the possibility that someone so tough could be the next president of the United States. All this while a series of media headlines appear superimposed about a draconian anti-LGTBQ law signed by DeSantis or suspension orders for events promoting gay identity in schools and with minors.
The campaign is part of DeSantis’s strategy to position himself to the right of Donald Trump, especially on social issues, as he made clear a few days ago when he insinuated that the former president, and clear favorite in the campaign for the Republican nomination, is a defender of affirmative action, which is how positive discrimination in favor of minorities is known in the US. Paradoxically, among the main economic supporters of the DeSantis campaign, investor Peter Thiel, a homosexual married to a man with whom he has several children, stands out in a very special way.
Thiel was also one of the main funders of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, to the point that at the Republican Convention he was the one who introduced Melania Trump. Since then, the businessman, to whom a heritage of around 10,000 million dollars (about 9,200 million euros) is attributed, has come to support DeSantis, and has also become one of the largest donors of the most nationalist wing. of the Republican Party. Thiel, who grew up in Namibia in the 1980s, when that country was occupied by South Africa and had a harsh system of apartheid -racial discrimination-, has made his fortune investing in companies such as Meta (the former Facebook) and SpaceX, running PayPal and founding Palantir.
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