Donald Trump’s entire political career has been built upon outright lies and bizarre fantasies. So, of course, we can expect more of the same from him during the State of the Union address on Tuesday night. We can be certain that he’ll brag about the fabulous job he’s done with the economy (thanks to Obama), how’s he lowered taxes (for the rich) and created jobs (actually a continuation of gains from Obama’s presidency). He’ll also make a case for the unnecessary border wall that his xenophobic base wants so badly. But since these are all his standard talking points about the amazing job he’s done while in office, none of this will really be a surprise.
However, what is surprising and also completely fantastical is that Trump is also expected to introduce a 10-year-plan to end HIV transmissions by 2030.
Yes, you read that right: Donald Trump is single-handedly going to end HIV in America. Or so his staff wants us to think.
According to Politico, Trump’s team has a strategy for health officials to target communities with the most HIV infections and work to reduce new transmissions over the course of the next decade. Officials would spend the first five years of this plan focusing on those communities across 20 states where the rates of infection are the highest. This announcement comes as the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) prepares to roll out its new HIV strategy this week. Politico notes, “The strategy has been championed by top health officials, including HHS Secretary Alex Azar and CDC Director Robert Redfield.” Redfield is a prominent AIDS researcher who was appointed to lead the CDC in the spring of 2018. He believes that ending AIDS is possible by 2025 with the widespread use of condoms and by utilizing other existing public health tools.
In theory, this sounds great. After all, more than a million people in the United States are living with HIV, and another 40,000 are infected each year. This is certainly a public health crisis that deserves the proper funding and support. And this kind of strategy, if effective, would undoubtedly save lives.
Except this is the Trump administration we are talking about. It can’t be trusted to do anything right—except cause terrible pain and suffering to the most vulnerable people in our society. And it already has a terrible track record when it comes to HIV/AIDS advocacy.
The president in January 2018 fired his HIV/AIDS advisory panel with no explanation, and the panel’s new members weren’t sworn in until last week.
Trump also repeatedly sought to cut the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, better known as PEPFAR — a multibillion-dollar initiative launched by former President George W. Bush, which has been credited with saving more than 17 million lives around the world.
For an entire year, Trump was completely without an HIV/AIDS advisory panel, meaning his administration was doing next to nothing about the issue. And his current nominee for attorney general, William Barr, once used his job at the Justice Department to “indefinitely detain hundreds of HIV-positive asylum-seekers [from Haiti] at a Guantanamo Bay detention center.” The Daily Beast details this hideous policy, which was deemed unconstitutional by a federal judge, who called it “an HIV prison camp.” Barr thought it was perfectly aboveboard to keep hundreds of HIV-positive asylum-seekers in detention. Some of them were children. All of them failed to receive adequate medical attention, per an admission by lawyers for the U.S. government. This fact bears repeating over and over again: Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general is a man who actually locked up HIV-positive Haitians seeking asylum. Sound familiar?
These should be glaring red flags alerting us that the Trump administration will not really do anything to end the spread of HIV. But our biggest clue that they aren’t serious about doing anything about HIV/AIDS relief is Mike Pence himself. Mike Pence is America’s No. 1 homophobe. He has nearly two decades of anti-LGBTQ activism under his belt. Just last month, his wife, Karen, took a job teaching at a Christian school that bans LGBTQ students and faculty. Pence is a religious fanatic using his warped version of Christianity to actively harm the LGBTQ community. And, sadly, he’s been given a huge opportunity to do it as vice president. This matters not only because the administration is doing all it can to actively roll back protections for LGBTQ communities, especially in health settings, but also because LGBTQ communities are disproportionately impacted by HIV infections. According to Politico, “about two-thirds of new HIV infections are in gay or bisexual men.”
So as wonderful as this initiative should be, it’s hard to see it as anything other than another way for Trump and company to deeply hurt people who actually need help. It’s not hard to imagine that instead of promoting condom use, they’ll be promoting abstinence-only and gay conversion therapy in these communities. And in high-risk communities with both people of color and members of LGBTQ communities, we can envision the disgusting, toxic blend of racism and homophobia they’ll be subjected to under this initiative.
It would be great to have a president who really understands the importance of ending new HIV transmissions and is willing to use tons of money, resources, and evidenced-based approaches to do it. But, sadly, this isn’t the one. Trump’s political brand is lies and grand fantasies that will never come true. We have no reason to believe he’ll actually start telling the truth and doing the right thing now.