First lady Jill Biden took aim at former President Donald Trump on Friday while speaking to an LGBT advocacy group.
“Donald Trump is a bully,” she said at the Human Rights Campaign’s Equality in Action event. “He is dangerous to the LGBTQ community, to our families, to our country, and we cannot let him win. We have to fight like hell until Joe and Kamala have another term.”
The first lady’s speech at the Sheraton Pentagon City in Arlington, Virginia, comes just after the launch of the Biden campaign’s “Out for Biden-Harris” initiative to engage LGBT voters.
“We’ve made progress, but there’s still so much more to do,” Jill Biden told the crowd of more than 500. “And we can’t and we won’t go back and refight the fights of the past.”
Those battles, she added, include rights being taken away, freedoms eroding, and state laws that target the LGBT community.
“Just last month, we had to fend off more than 50 anti-gay amendments that Republicans tried to force into the government funding bill,” she said, explaining that the amendments would have limited healthcare and other protections for same-sex couples.
Jill Biden specifically mentioned Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, calling it the “Don’t Say Gay law.” Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has defended the bill, saying Democrats have a false narrative of its contents.
Trump, the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party, is also seeking to win over LGBT voters. His wife, former first lady Melania Trump, will host a fundraising event for the Log Cabin Republicans, a GOP LGBT group, at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort on April 20.
But Jill Biden warned that more archaic laws could be passed if people do not fight back.
“One group of people loses their rights and then another and then another,” she said, “until one morning you wake up and you no longer live in a democracy.”
“This is our chapter of history, and it’s up to us how it ends,” Jill Biden added.
She credited President Joe Biden with promoting marriage equality, allowing gay men to donate blood, transgender people to serve in the military, and fighting against conversion therapy.
The LGBT community, the first lady said, is now “free to walk down the street as your authentic self. Co-workers that use your chosen name and pronouns. Kids with two moms or two dads on the playground. Communities that support you — understand you.”
She then shared a personal story of confronting a neighborhood bully at the age of 13.
“I had no idea what I was going to say to him,” Jill Biden said. “But when he opened the door, without thinking, I pulled back and punched him right in the face.”
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While she admitted she may have done it differently today, the lesson held that “when bullies threaten our loved ones, when they strip away our basic rights and deny our basic humanity, when they put our country and our democracy at risk, there’s only one thing to do: We fight.”
The crowd gave her a standing ovation and shouted, “Four more years,” as she left the stage.