President Trump delights in playing what he calls “the gay national anthem” whenever he wants to rev up a crowd. He’s obsessed with Elton John, was once friendly with Liza Minnelli, and has a Liberace-esque flair for gilded interiors. One of his favorite sports to watch—mixed martial arts—is basically sweaty, semi-naked dudes. And he is a deep and vocal admirer of the physique of fellow men, often announcing which ones he would cast in a movie: “They’re perfect specimens,” he said last year of the military pilots who had visited him in the Oval Office; “He looks like the Marlboro Man,” he cooed about a former Iowa state senator; “Young, handsome guy. It’s always nice to be young and handsome,” he complimented the president of Paraguay.
Some of Trump’s allies note that years before gay marriage was legalized, Trump had gay friends, took pro-gay stances, and allowed gay people to join his private club in Palm Beach starting in the mid-1990s. Ric Grenell became the first openly gay person to hold a Cabinet position when Trump appointed him acting director of national intelligence. Grenell, who is now the president’s envoy for special missions, once called Trump “the most pro-gay president in American history,” a title that Trump said he was honored to have.
To be clear: Trump says he is attracted only to women and, in fact, has been married to three of them. He once hosted the Miss Universe pageant, was caught on tape saying that he loves to grab women “by the pussy,” and was found civilly liable for sexually abusing a woman. Loads more have accused him of sexual misconduct. (Trump has denied the accusations.) “Women—I like. Men—no, I don’t have any interest,” Trump affirmed at a Board of Peace meeting earlier this year.
But there’s also little doubt that Trump has unabashedly embraced the aesthetic—the je ne sais quoi—of a certain kind of gay man. Some who are sympathetic to the president have gone even further. Blaze Media, a conservative outlet started by the talk-radio host Glenn Beck, ran a story in 2024 headlined “Donald Trump: Our First Gay President,” much in the way people talked about Bill Clinton as having been the first Black one. The story notes, in a section titled “Queen of Queens”: “He blows kisses to Hulk Hogan, weighs in on Fashion Week (‘used to be so glamorous and exciting! No stars, no fun—just boring’), and his rivalry with lesbian Rosie O’Donnell remains a gem of the catty naughties social feuds.” Pod Save America, a liberal podcast started by former aides to President Obama, declared that Trump would be a gay icon, if only he had “liberal social values.” The president, the episode’s title observes, “DEMANDS a Ballroom at the White House, Loves Musicals, & Wears Make-up.”
James Kirchick, the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, told me that Trump’s personal story, a guy from Queens making it big in Manhattan, tracks with the “typical gay story” of men of his era. In another life, he continued, the 79-year-old could be a classic aging gay, “living in Wilton Manors, sitting at a bar, making bitchy comments to everyone who comes in.” (Of course, Trump’s perch from the Oval Office confers much more power than a bar stool does, and his comments have moved markets and sent allies reeling.) “It’s a gay man frozen in amber in the late 1970s and early 1980s, before AIDS,” Kirchick said, referring to the type of gay man he believes Trump would embody. “It’s a certain age and a certain era. It’s very campy.”
The comedian and podcaster Caleb Hearon deemed Trump to be of the “old-school-gay” era, “because, you know, gay guys used to be mean before media training,” he said in an interview with Ziwe Fumudoh on her YouTube comedy show. The president, Hearon continued, should have become “a red-carpet fashion adviser,” the sort who would say things like: “That dress, honey. I don’t think so!” “That would have been amazing. I would have watched every night,” he said. “Instead, he ran for office on a platform of mass deportation, so that’s where things got tricky, obviously.”
[Read: The surprising reason for the new homophobia]
People close to Trump say he has long been gay-friendly in his actions as a private citizen. In the early days of his career as a developer, Trump was mentored by Roy Cohn, the legendary and ruthless New York lawyer and political fixer, who was gay. During Studio 54’s heyday, Trump relished making cameos. In 2024, Trump quietly allowed a gay wedding at Mar-a-Lago, although he didn’t attend.
But Trump has also been willing to vilify transgender individuals, especially athletes, for political gain. The ACLU has issued a scathing assessment of Trump’s record on LGBTQ rights, and the Trevor Project, which supports LGBTQ youth, said that outreach to its crisis hotline skyrocketed—a 700 percent increase—the day after he was elected a second time. Jonathan Lovitz, a senior vice president at Human Rights Campaign, wrote to me in an email that LGBTQ+ people helped profoundly shape the culture that Trump experienced while coming of age in New York City. That’s why, he continued, many queer people are offended when Trump engages in certain forms of camp: “Not because it’s tacky (which it is), but because it underscores a deeper contradiction: he wants the benefits of a country and culture that queer people helped create, while advancing policies that make those same people less safe every day.”
Trump’s continued patter about men’s bodies has also drawn attention. As my colleague Marie-Rose Sheinerman and I dug into examples of these corporeal appraisals, we were surprised by their sheer quantity and just how much Trump seems to delight in complimenting other men. He has given the compliment of “handsome” at least 68 times so far in his second term—or 69 times, if we count the two Thanksgiving turkeys he also collectively described as such. He is unapologetic in his preference for Cabinet members and administration officials who seem to come out of “central casting”; he praised Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is gay, for his Hollywood-worthy bona fides, before appreciatively noting that “under that beautiful exterior is a killer.”
He can almost never resist commenting on the physique of brawny men: “Look at the muscles on this guy!” he said, gazing upon a young cadet while delivering the commencement address at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy last week. Two days later, he took pains to praise the New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart, calling him a “beautiful guy” and waxing poetic about his “legs like tree trunks.” And speaking about the golfer Arnold Palmer in 2024, Trump managed to both reassert his preference for women while also remarking on the legend’s masculinity: “I love women, but this guy—this guy—this is a guy that was all man.” (He also noted Palmer’s powerful swing with “stiff-shafted clubs,” and his, um, alleged other assets: “When he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there—they said, Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.”)
[Read: The question that the lawyers representing trans athletes didn’t answer]
Unsurprisingly, late-night hosts and comedians have been eager to tango with Trump’s inner gay. Bransen Gates, an actor and a social-media personality, has become known for his Instagram videos in which he takes snippets of Trump’s speeches and vampishly lip-synchs them—mouth pursed, eyes wide yet coy, finger wagging—under archetypes such as “The straight man speaking at graduation who is ‘definitely not gay’” and “When you have a crush on a guy named Stephen” (Miller, in Trump’s case). In perhaps his best-known video, aptly titled “Tr*mp was born to be a gay man,” Gates reprises Trump’s comments at an October 2020 campaign rally. “I’ll kiss every guy—man and woman, man and woman,” Gates-as-Trump says, complete with sexually suggestive winks, eye rolls, and light shimmies. “Look at that guy, how handsome he is. I’ll kiss him, not—not with a lot of enjoyment, but that’s okay.”
In a March Fox News interview, Trump was asked about the sexuality of Iran’s leader, the sort of highly sensitive question that nearly any other president would have handled with utmost care. Instead, Trump somehow pivoted to how “the Palestinian regime” is bad for gays—“Who are the gays for Palestine?” he mused—and later laughingly noted that one of his rally songs, “Y.M.C.A.,” by the Village People, is considered “the gay national anthem.”
“I did very well with the gay vote, okay?” he told the hosts. (The “gay vote” is a difficult thing to measure, although a variety of polls found that in both the 2020 and 2024 elections, Trump did have some gay support. However, a majority of voters who identified as LGBT preferred his Democratic opponents.)
Paul Baker, the author of Camp!: The Story of the Attitude That Conquered the World, told me over email that when it comes to Trump, making the distinction between camp and campy is important. The latter is the more self-conscious, ironic adoption of camp. But Trump is “the original, pure form—it’s when someone’s behaviour is outrageous, excessive, subversive and unintentionally funny,” he said. “The person doesn’t realise they’re funny or that they’re camp. They’re just being themselves.”
The risk, he continued, is when camp becomes a distraction from the president’s actual policies, such as executive orders and actions that could negatively affect LGBTQ health. Upon returning to office, for instance, Trump rescinded nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ youth in school, which advocates say could worsen their mental health. “Laugh at him on Instagram all you like, but don’t let that take away oxygen from crucial topics like electoral reform, protecting democracy, gun control, immigration, healthcare and access to education in the US,” Baker concluded in his email to me.
Kirchick’s husband, Josef Palermo, was the Kennedy Center’s first curator of visual arts, until he was laid off after Trump took control of the cultural institution. (Palermo forwent a severance agreement to be able to publicly share—including in an essay for The Atlantic—his observations about the decimation of the Kennedy Center under Trump’s leadership.) Before Palermo lost his job last year, the two attended the Kennedy Center Honors, which Trump hosted, and Kirchick discovered that he prefers Trump more as a gala emcee than as a political leader. Kirchick said that Trump was “great” in the role, describing him as “a combination of Joan Rivers and Don Rickles.” He added wistfully: “I wish he could just do that.”
Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed to this report.
*Illustration sources: Roberto Schmidt / Getty; Christian Rose / Roger Viollet / Getty; Echoes / Redferns / Getty; Jack Robinsonv / Hulton Archive / Getty
The post The King of Queens appeared first on The Atlantic.
