Donald Trump Jr mocks ‘triggered’ LGBT students for protesting anti-gay Chick-fil-A
Donald Trump Jr has mocked LGBT students at a university for protesting homophobic chicken chain Chick-fil-A.
The son of the President of the United States, who was left “in charge” of the Trump Organization by his dad, followed in the family tradition of sending rude and ignorant tweets.
Sharing an article about students protesting the arrival of Chick-fil-A branch at their university, the 39-year-old Don Jr wrote: “Luckily these students wont [sic] likely have to tackle issues more stressful than a yummy chicken sandwich in their lives… Oh Wait #triggered”.
Trump Jr’s use of the word “triggered” to mock the LGBT student activists parrots rhetoric used on anti-LGBT websites.
The chicken chain has long been subject to one of the most well-known boycotts from LGBT activists due to its funding of homophobia.
In 2012 it emerged that the fried chicken company had donated millions of dollars to anti-gay groups including the Family Research Council, ‘gay cure’ group Exodus International and Focus on the Family.
CEO Dan Cathy has militantly refused to back away from its positions, confirming the company was “guilty as charged” for backing “the biblical definition of a family”.
He said: “We are very much supportive of the family – the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.
“We operate as a family business … our restaurants are typically led by families; some are single. We want to do anything we possibly can to strengthen families. We are very much committed to that.”
Since Trump Sr took power in January, there has been a rapid shift in policy on LGBT issues across many federal government departments.
The Department of Education has reversed civil rights protections for transgender people, the Attorney General has shelved government opposition to North Carolina’s anti-LGBT law, and the Department of Health and Human Services axed data collection on LGBT issues.
Meanwhile, Trump has used executive orders to significantly weaken federal protections against discrimination, while senior Republicans are openly lobbying him to sign a ‘religious freedom’ order to enshrine the right to discriminate against LGBT people.
A draft executive order leaked from inside the White House earlier this year that would actively permit religious discrimination against LGBT people.
The leaked order would protect people who discriminate based on “the belief that marriage is or should be recognised as the union of one man and one woman [or that] male and female refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy at birth”.
After the document leaked and sparked immediate protests, White House officials claimed it had been spiked – but insiders say it is still secretly being worked on, and is being re-drafted to make it less vulnerable to a legal challenge.
Donald Trump’s former primary opponents Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are both among a group of Republican Senators who have publicly urged him to sign the order in recent weeks.
