When speaking to an LGBT advocacy group, the first woman addressed the former president with criticism.
“Donald Trump is a bully,” she said at the Human Rights Campaign’s Equality in Action occasion. “He is harmful to our families, to our land, and we cannot let him win. We must fight like champs until Joe and Kamala win another term.”
The second lady’s statement at the Sheraton Pentagon City in Arlington, Virginia, comes just after the release of the Biden campaign’s “Out for Biden” initiative to engage gay voters.
“We’ve made headway, but there’s still so much more to do,” Jill Biden told the audience of more than 500. “And we can’t and we won’t go back and refight the fights of the past.”
Those wars, she added, include freedoms being taken apart, rights eroding, and state laws that target the LGBT community.
She explained that the modifications may have restricted access to same-sex couples’ medical and other protections, and that “just next month, we had to fight off more than 50 anti-gay amendments that Republicans tried to force into the state revenue bill.”
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 misinterpretation of its contents.
The Republican Party’s presumed nominee also aims to appeal to gay citizens. His partner, former first lady Melania Trump, may network with a GOP LGBT team at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort on April 20.
However, Jill Biden warned that if people didn’t take action, new, archaic laws might be passed.
She said, “Until one morning you wake up and you no longer live in a democracy, one group of people loses their rights, then another, and then another,” adding, “until one group of people loses their rights.”
“This is our chapter of history, and it’s up to us how it ends,” Jill Biden added.
She credited President Biden with promoting marriage equality, allowing gay men to donate blood, transgender people to serve in the military, and fighting against discrimination.
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 back you understand you.
Then, at the age of 13, she shared her own experience of confronting a bully in her neighborhood.
Jill Biden said, “I had no idea what I was going to say to him.” “But when he opened the door, without thinking, I pulled back and punched him right in the face.”
There is only one thing we can do: We fight, even though she acknowledged she may have done it differently today. The lesson was 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 in danger, are we doing it.
The crowd gave her a standing ovation and shouted, “Four more years,” as she left the stage.
