Viewers were left confused when President Donald Trump‘s son, Eric Trump, said on Fox News that he was “part of the LGBT community.” Eric, 36, was asked on the September 29 episode of Fox & Friends about a lesbian New Yorker who supports his father’s presidential campaign. He responded, “I’m telling you, I see it every day, the LGBT community, they are incredible and you should see how they’ve come out in full force for my father every single day. I’m part of that community and we love the man and thank you for protecting our neighborhoods and thank you for protecting our cities.”
That gave viewers pause: did Eric just come out as a member of the LGBTQ community, or did he simply misspeak? The speculation ran rampant on Twitter. “eric trump coming out is not the birthday gift this homosexual wanted,” one Twitter user tweeted, while another asked, “Does @EricTrump
know what LGBT(Q) means?” Fair question! Others were livid over the chance that Eric could be exploiting the community to make his father look better before the upcoming presidential election.
After all, the Trump administration has a disastrous track record when it comes to LGBTQ rights. Just days after taking office in January 2017, the new president announced that he would be rolling back protections for transgender individuals in the military, including not allowing any new transgender recruits. “Time to pander to anything they can right before the election. Where were they for the past 4 years?” one critic wrote.
Eric said later in a statement to the New York Post that he was misunderstood during his Fox News interview, and merely trying to paraphrase. “To clarify, many of our close friends are part of the LGBT community, which was the intent of my statement — the left has taken that vote for granted for a long time and support from the gay community for my father is incredible,” he stated. “As to me personally, as I think you know, I am a happily married man to my wife, Lara.”