Log Cabin GOP: Trump Best President for LGBT Community ‘Ever’

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — While MAGA was in full force and party mode this past week at CPAC 2025, smaller subsets of the conservative Republican establishment said they had their own reasons to celebrate.

Among these were the Log Cabin Republicans, gay members of the GOP and their allies, who reject progressive notions of what it means to be homosexual in American society, and seek to build bridges between the LGBT community and their straight counterparts in the Grand Old Party.

“I mean, it’s pretty straightforward,” Ed Williams, executive director of the group, said when asked why he was in a celebratory mood as CPAC got underway last week. “Donald Trump is the best president for LGBT ever.”

“He is the first person to enter the White House being in support of the LGBT community and gay marriage,” Williams continued.

“No other president has ever walked into the White House supporting gay marriage — not even President Obama,” he added, referencing what the former president himself once referred to as the “evolution” in his thinking on gay marriage over the years.

Williams also pointed to Trump’s choosing Scott Bessent, a married, openly gay man who has two children with his partner, to be his Treasury secretary.

“And remember, Trump also had a gay marriage at Mar-a-Lago,” he said, referring to the 2024 marriage of John Sullivan, vice chair and treasurer of the Tennessee Log Cabin Republicans and his partner Dan Medora, at Trump’s home and resort.

Two years earlier, the Log Cabin Republicans held their Spirit of Lincoln gala at the property.

According to those in attendance, Trump gave a speech at the event, while then-former First Lady Melania Trump received an award.

For those who either don’t remember or never knew in the first place, the Log Cabin Republicans were formed in California in 1977 in response to a statewide ballot initiative to prevent gay and lesbian people from teaching in public schools. 

The bill was sponsored by Republican State Sen. John Briggs, and ultimately lost by more than 1 million votes after Ronald Reagan himself, then harboring presidential ambitions, came out against it.

The group is named in honor of President Abraham Lincoln, who happened to have been born in a log cabin.

In addition to being the first Republican president of the United States, Lincoln is also strongly associated with the concepts of liberty and equality under the law.

“We are loyal Republicans, and obviously, Log Cabin Republicans support a lot of things President Trump also supports, things like having limited government, a strong national defense, free markets, low taxes and individual liberty,” Williams said.

“In addition, and again, I think in agreement with the president, we believe equality for LGBT Americans is in the finest tradition of the Republican Party — and we work to make the party more inclusive,” he said.

With that, the conversation turned to actions Trump has taken regarding the transgender community since his swearing in on Jan. 20.

These include signing an executive order within hours of inauguration that said the government henceforth would recognize only two unchangeable sexes: female and male.

The order also directed government agencies to stop using taxpayer money to promote what it calls “gender ideology,” and by the end of his first week in office, the term “gender” was wiped from federal websites.

The change also prompted other actions by departments and agencies. For instance, the State Department promptly stopped granting requests for new or updated passports with gender markers that don’t conform with the new definition.

And some of the language contained in Trump’s executive orders was quite strong. In one he accused medical professionals of “maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex.”

Williams said while the liberal gay community sees the steps Trump has taken as abhorrent and transphobic, Log Cabin Republicans feel executive orders he signed in this regard are grounded in common sense.

“What it comes down to is, Trump and we believe that you have a right to freedom of speech and freedom to express yourself, and if you want to dress up like a man or a woman, you are welcome to go right ahead — you’re an adult and you are an American, go for it,” he said.

“But you don’t necessarily have the right to compel someone else’s speech or thoughts or feelings about that, and you certainly don’t have the right to impose your views on children,” Williams continued. “I mean, there are children, right now, who are facing horrendous repercussions after going through certain hormone treatments, even without their parents’ consent.

“These are life-altering drugs, life-altering medical procedures, and we believe that it is not appropriate, at all, to perform these procedures on minors,” he said.

Ultimately, Willliams said disagreements over transgender and other social issues illustrate the broader differences between the conservative and the liberal approach to equality.

“You know, on one level, conservative gays and liberal gays do look very similar. Both appear to be fighting for equality,” he said. “But our approach is much different from the way liberal groups and Democrats and progressives approach equality.

“Equality for us is equality before the law,” Williams continued. “If the government extends a right or privilege to any American, they should also extend it to anyone in America that happens to be gay, whether what we’re talking about is tax benefits, marriage licensing, adoption, employment protections or anything along those lines.

“A right or benefit bestowed by the government should be extended equally to every American, it should not matter whether you are gay or not,” he said. “The liberal perspective on this is they want equality to extend to the right to not be offended.

“They believe they have the right to legislate other people’s thoughts and feelings and speech so that they don’t feel bad about who they are, and so there’s a fundamental difference in what we do, and in terms of how we approach what we want,” Williams said.

“We want an equal playing field. We want merit-based employment. We want all those sorts of things. The Democrats want something more radical than that — they want to legislate how you treat me and you speak about me. Again, they want to create a right to not be offended,” he said.

Williams said he believes what he described as the left’s “radical gender ideology” has actually backfired and had a negative effect on the acceptance of gays and lesbians across the country.

“And that’s a problem,” he said.

Williams also said that with his executive orders, Trump is “repairing a lot of the damage.”

“But it’s not as easy as signing an executive order in the Oval Office, it’s going to take a lot of work, and it means getting out there and being active in our communities,” he said. 

“We now have chapters in 41 states, with members who are out there in their neighborhoods, out there in their respective state parties; in fact, I was the first openly gay Republican Party chairman in Nevada back in 2014, so I can tell you, first-hand, about the importance of local exposure and getting our into our communities on a grassroots level,” Williams said.

“Executive orders are important, but we, as Log Cabin Republicans and advocates, don’t sign executive orders,” he said. “For us, achieving our goals for cultural change happens at the grassroots, in our respective communities.”

Dan can be reached at [email protected] and @DanMcCue