The Forum Built for Stanning Trump Has Pivoted to Hating Gay People
The Donald’s cultish devotion to its namesake has verged on the comical. Billing itself as a “high-energy” online “rally” for “serious supporters of President Trump,” the infamous Reddit-like forum’s front page features a portrait of the former president in generalissimo garb, replete with war medals and golden epaulets. Posts about Trump on the site are often tagged with a badge reading “GEOTUS,” an acronym for “God Emperor of the United States.”
But lately the online platform’s hero worship of Trump is waning. The community has been galvanized, instead, by culture-war crusades about which Trump himself has been relatively muted. In particular, posts have centered around the anti-LGBTQ hate now being marshaled into consumer boycotts of brands like Target and Bud Light.
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“Easily three-quarters of the threads on the site are related to hatred and animosity towards the LGBTQ+ community — and in particular the trans community,” says Katie McCarthy, an investigative researcher at the Center on Extremism, a project of the Anti-Defamation League, who monitors the site daily. “They’re sort of beginning to abandon Trump.”
The Donald, for the uninitiated, resembles Reddit, where it was first launched. Users post news stories, memes, and images that other readers can then “upvote,” with the highest-rated posts rising to the top. (The Donald differs from Reddit in that even the up arrows feature an image of Trump’s grinning mug.)
Yet on The Donald on Memorial Day, for example, the first explicitly Trump-related post — highlighting Trump’s holiday Truth Social post that trolled the “LUNATIC THUGS WHO ARE WORKING FEVERISHLY FROM WITHIN TO OVERTURN AND DESTROY OUR ONCE GREAT COUNTRY” — was ranked 44th on the front page.
Instead, many of the forum’s top-ranking posts featured seething anti-LGBTQ sentiment, including:
“John Cleese Says ‘Life Of Brian’ Tranny Scene Won’t Be Cut Despite Whiney Little Bitches Complaining”
“Rap Anthem ‘Boycott Target’ Surges to No. 2 on iTunes After Retailer Pushed Gay, Transgender Apparel for Children”
“New Mexico has become a ‘sanctuary state’ for trans people” (This post was adorned with a badge reading: “Lock Them Up!”)
“Bud Light’s gayest can yet”
Rolling Stone first took note of this phenomenon in April, the day after Trump was arraigned on 34 felony counts, looking to The Donald to gauge reaction from Trump’s biggest backers. But by April 5, the front page was focused elsewhere. “Go Hoosiers!” read a starred post at the top of the site, celebrating a bill ending gender-affirming care for minors. “Indiana becomes the 12th state to ban the mutilation of innocent children.” Another top post read: “A Majority of Parents report ‘worse & declining mental health’ in post-transition children.”
McCarthy, the extremism researcher, observed the site in real time, diving deep into its chat threads. She recalls only a short burst of fury. “When Trump was indicted, we saw chatter about that for several days; they were very angry about it,” she says, citing a “return to big calls for civil war, violence, and retribution.” But that rage soon abated: “They moved on from it quickly. It just doesn’t seem to be able to animate and drive the community anymore like it once did.”
The Donald has long been a forum where Trump supporters revel in the trollish, “red-pilled” culture that Trump’s MAGA movement injected into the mainstream. But instead of a Trump-loving forum for people who happen to dabble in hate, The Donald is morphing into a hate-loving venue for people who happen to dabble in Trump.
“That toxic, hateful undercurrent has always been there,” says McCarthy. “But it has come to the foreground now, and issues related to Trump have been taken backstage.” (A request for comment sent to The Donald’s email for press inquiries was not returned.)
Remarkably, the anti-LGBTQ hate on The Donald goes beyond what Trump himself has advocated. Trump, in the past, made overtures to the queer community. He famously did a skit with Rudy Giuliani in drag; his 2016 campaign sold MAGA Pride merch; and he invited Caitlyn Jenner to his nominating convention, where he insisted: “As your president I will do everything in my power to protect LGBTQ citizens.”
In his presidential term, Trump broke his word, rolling back substantive LGBTQ protections, in particular for trans Americans. But Trump and his acolytes continued to tout him as an LGBTQ champion during the 2020 campaign. Only in recent months has Trump adopted some of the odious rhetoric now sweeping the right. He vowed in an Iowa speech to halt gender-affirming care for minors, which he called “child sexual mutilation,” while denouncing “the left-wing gender insanity” as “child abuse.”
On consumer boycotts, Trump has led from behind. Long after the rage about a promotional can of Bud Light, created for trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney, had reached a roiling boil, Trump posted an oblique boycott endorsement on Truth Social: “It’s time to beat the Radical Left at their own game. Money does talk—Anheuser-Busch now understands that.”
The history of The Donald features significant upheaval and reinvention — but the through line has always been an undying devotion to the Dear Leader Trump. The forum began as a subreddit (r/The_Donald) well before Trump was elected. The MAGA leader embraced the site and even treated his superfans to an AMA in 2016. But during the course of the Trump administration, The Donald’s gravitation toward extremist rhetoric and QAnon conspiracy, and its refusal to self-moderate, forced Reddit to ban the forum, which had nearly 800,000 users.
The Donald was soon relaunched, however, as a Reddit clone at the website TheDonald.win. That site attracted an ever more radical audience, with up to a million active users per day. After the 2020 election, the no-holds-barred site veered into dangerous promotion of violence, seeking to keep Trump in power. The final report of the Jan. 6 Committee mentions The Donald 38 times, including that, “Users on TheDonald.win, a website populated by some of President Trump’s most ardent fans, openly discussed surrounding and occupying the U.S. Capitol.”
The report added horrific color:
The site hosted a diagram showing how to tie a hangman’s knot, with one site member writing that they should build gallows “so the traitors know the stakes.” On January 5, 2021, hours before the attack began, a user posted an image of gallows and titled it, “Election Fraud Repair Kit.”
In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection, the owner of the website domain pulled the plug on the site.
But a breakaway faction of moderators once again reconstituted the forum under the website Patriots.win, preserving The Donald as the forum’s name as well as Trump imagery — including a presidential seal at the top of the page, and a banner juxtaposing Trump’s eyes with those of an eagle.
Based on daily monitoring of the site, McCarthy attributes The Donald’s fading love affair with its namesake to a pair of Trump-specific factors: far-right bitterness over Trump’s failure to pardon the Jan. 6 offenders when he had a chance, or to use his post-presidential platform for their defense. The perception, McCarthy says, is that “these people went out on a limb for him that day. They got arrested. And he hasn’t really done enough to help them out.” Another significant factor for a community steeped in distrust of Big Pharma is Trump’s continued promotion of the Covid vaccine and his celebration of Operation Warp Speed as a victory. “That’s become a major sticking point for some of the big Trump supporting personalities out there,” McCarthy says.
As he campaigns for president, Trump is returning to his greatest hits, including old-school bashing of “illegal immigrants.” But it hardly moves the needle at The Donald. On Wednesday, Trump’s unconstitutional threat to deny citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants barely cracked the site’s top 10 — a list dominated by posts hating on Anheuser Busch and Target, and praising lawmakers in Texas, Montana, and Tennessee for clawing back LGBTQ rights.
More than anything, the online actors at The Donald are discovering what broad swaths of the right have already found out: that a populist movement built on shared animosity toward vulnerable Americans doesn’t require a Dear Leader to guide it. The former president may matter much less to the crowd populating his namesake forum than the quest to Make America Hate Again that he helped unleash.
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