NEW YORK — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is defending an anti-LGBTQ video his marketing campaign shared on-line that assaults rival Donald Trump for his previous assist of homosexual and transgender individuals, regardless of a few of his fellow Republicans calling it homophobic.

DeSantis, in an interview Wednesday on the podcast of conservative commentator Tomi Lahren, didn't tackle accusations that the video was homophobic however stated the intent was “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 stated.

His presidential marketing campaign shared the video on Twitter final week, on the final day of June’s LGBTQ+ Pride Month, saying, “To wrap up ‘Pride Month,’ let’s hear from the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate it.”

The video was posted amid a rising conservative marketing campaign towards LGBTQ rights and celebrations. It highlighted a few of Trump’s previous statements supporting LGBTQ individuals, together with saying he’d be OK with transgender ladies competing sooner or later within the Miss Universe pageant, which Trump owned on the time of these remarks.

It additionally featured darkish photographs of DeSantis with lightning popping out of his eyes, headlines that stated he signed a “draconian anti-trans bathroom bill” and pictures of muscular shirtless males and clips of Christian Bale within the 2000 film “American Psycho,” through which he performs a serial killer.

After the video was shared by the DeSantis War Room Twitter account on Friday, it drew instant criticism. The Log Cabin Republicans, a corporation devoted to representing LGBT conservatives, known as the video “divisive and desperate” and stated it “ventured into homophobic territory.”

Republican Richard Grenell, who served as Trump’s nationwide intelligence director and was the primary brazenly homosexual Cabinet member in any administration, stated the video was “undeniably homophobic.”

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a Democrat who's brazenly homosexual, criticized the video throughout an interview on CNN on Sunday.

“I’m going to leave aside the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up shirtless bodybuilders, and just get to a bigger issue that is on my mind whenever I see this stuff in the policy space, which is, again, who are you trying to help? Who are you trying to make better off?” Buttigieg stated.

Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump’s marketing campaign, responded to the governor’s feedback utilizing a model of a derisive nickname Trump has been utilizing for DeSantis, saying merely: “A desperate DeSanctus campaign, with a flailing candidate, in its last throes of relevancy.”

DeSantis’ marketing campaign on Thursday declined to remark additional or reply to the criticism.

The video comes as some conservatives have fashioned an more and more vocal and hostile marketing campaign towards LGBTQ+ rights - from the backlash to companies which have proven assist for LGBTQ+ individuals to makes an attempt to ban rainbow Pride flag shows, limit drag reveals, ban gender-affirming take care of minors and limit transgender athletes from aggressive sports.

The motion has grow to be a central level within the GOP presidential contest, with DeSantis specifically highlighting anti-LGBTQ+ laws he’s signed and criticizing President Joe Biden for displaying the Pride flag on the White House.

Trump has pledged that, if elected to the White House once more, he would signal govt orders that minimize U.S. tax funding for colleges pushing “transgender insanity” and well being care suppliers providing gender-affirming take care of minors.

Trump and DeSantis each often assault the participation of transgender ladies in ladies’s sports and label gender-affirming take care of minors as “mutilation.”

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