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GoLocalProv | News | Trump’s Flip-Flop on Transgender Issues – and RI Native Olivia Culpo’s Role
Saturday, June 17, 2023
Former President Donald Trump PHOTO: GoLocal, Olivia Culpo, PHOTO: Promo Miss Universe
Former President — and 2024 Presidential candidate — Donald Trump this year promised to “defeat the cult of gender ideology and reaffirm that God created two genders, man and woman.”
His stance, however, is a complete flip-flop from his public statements supporting transgendered individuals that he made in 2012 during the Miss USA pageant
And at the center at the time of the controversy is Rhode Island’s Olivia Culpo.
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In “uncovered radio and television interviews from spring and summer 2012, Trump celebrated the interest in a 23-year-old transgender woman named Jenna Talackova participating in a Canadian pageant,” CNN reported Friday. “He then later effusively praised the winner of the Miss USA pageant, Olivia Culpo, for saying that transgender women should be allowed to compete.”
When Culpo was a finalist in the pageant, she was asked the following question — and provided the following answer.
“Would you feel it would be fair that a transgender woman wins the Miss USA title over a natural-born woman?” asked celebrity judge Robert Kardashian.
“I do think that would be fair…but I can understand that people would be a little apprehensive to take that road because there is a tradition of natural born women, but today there are so many surgeries and so many people who have a need to change for a happier life,” said Culpo. “I do accept that, because I believe it’s a free country.”
Trump Endorsed Culpo’s Stance
“She gave a great answer, a very tough question – on transgender – just the question everybody wants to hear, and she gave a great answer and she really did a great job,” Trump said praising Culpo on “Fox and Friends” in June 2012.
Trump has a history of changing not just ideologies — but parties.
He registered as a Republican in Manhattan in 1987, switched to the Reform Party in 1999, the Democratic Party in 2001, and back to the Republican Party in 2009.
In its look at Trump’s reversal of opinion on transgendered individuals competing in events, CNN wrote:
“Trump, then the owner of the Miss Universe pageant, would go on to cite the possible participation of transgender women in Olympic sports to justify his decision to end a ban on transgender pageant participants.
But a decade later, as he geared up to run for a second White House term, Trump promised to ‘ban men from participating in women’s sports,’ when speaking about transgender athletes – a reflection of how restricting trans rights has become a powerful talking point among conservatives and a potential a litmus test for Republican candidates.”
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