President Donald Trump directed the National Park Service (NPS) to remove the Rainbow Pride Flag from the Stonewall National Monument in New York City on February 5, 2026.

This came just one year after the NPS deleted all references to transgender and queer people from its website of the Stonewall National Monument through Trump’s executive order. The initialism that once read LGBTQ+ has been reduced to LGB, standing for lesbian, gay, and bisexual.

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Local and state elected officials, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) and Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal (D), are planning to re-raise the Pride Flag in defiance of the president’s petty and cruel ban.

During his second term, President Barack Obama designated the monument in 2016.

Many historians and activists place the beginning of the modern movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, an asexual equality at the Stonewall Inn, a small bar frequented by trans people, lesbians, bisexuals, gay males, street people, students, and others located at 53 Christopher Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village in late June 1969.

During his first and second regimes, Trump has issued several executive orders in his attempt to erase LGBTQ+ history, people, and identities from the U.S. experience. He has banned trans athletes from school and professional sports, from using the public facilities of their choice, and from choosing to have gender-affirming procedures to maintain their bodily autonomy.

He signed an executive order declaring that there are only two genders. This led to a series of specific policy changes. Titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” the order describes biological sex as being determined by the size of one’s reproductive cells: small for men and large for women.

Government documents, including passports, visas, and employee records, can only show “male” or “female.” The government will no longer pay for trans-related health care, such as for government employees, military personnel, or federal prisoners.

In addition, Trump ordered all transgender women incarcerated in federal prisons to be thrown into male prison facilities.

In another of Trump’s orders, the federal government will no longer even recognize the existence of trans people and will prevent federal funds from being spent on any programs that do so.

The order says, “Federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology,” and it directs the Bureau of Prisons to revise its policies to ensure that federal inmates do not receive “any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.”

Trump has threatened to kick out trans service members from the military. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has banned Rainbow flags from flying in U.S. embassies.

Aspect of Anti-DEI Attacks

Trump’s assaults on queer people must not be seen in isolation, for they are directly connected with his attacks on programs and policies related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in governmental and private institutions. He has supported the banning of books and other curricular materials, training procedures, written policies, and other concerns in schools and in the workplace meant to ensure cultural sensitivity and understanding.

He has transformed the terms within the concept of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” into accusations and epithets for “unqualified,” “low experience,” “low education,” “low expectations,” “anti-white,” “anti-male,” and “anti-Christian” regarding workplace quality and performance.

In reality, however, to paraphrase the National Association for Multicultural Education: “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is a philosophical and educational model founded on principles of freedom, justice, equality, equity, and the empowerment of human agency, integrity, and dignity as illuminated in respective key documents, including the United States Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights. DEI affirms a standard of governmental, educational, and business policies and practices in organizing and sustaining positive, warm, and welcoming places essential in a democratic society. It values the many social and cultural differences and identities and prizes the pluralism that all people bring.”

What is more “pro-American” and “patriotic” than programs and people who are attempting to bring about the promise of our founding documents? In most social change efforts, however, opposing forces have launched a fierce, sustained backlash to roll back progress, as we are seeing now with DEI initiatives.

Trump, however, opposes the iconic motto of the United States, e pluribus unum (out of many, one), in favor of his “unitary executive theory,” which dictates total control of the federal executive branch.

While in the Oval Office during his first term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order in September 2020 banning DEI programs in government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and other institutions that held or applied for federal contracts. The stated purpose of the order was to “combat offensive and anti-American race and sex stereotyping.”

In his ruthless campaign to turn Florida into the place “where WOKE goes to die,” for example, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) launched a frontal assault on issues of DEI initiatives in that state, and to place the final nail in the coffin of affirmative action in higher education stemming from the recent Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. (SFFA) v. President & Fellows of Harvard College (Harvard) and SFFA v. University of North Carolina.

Trump has literally and symbolically grabbed the bulldozer by the horns to demolish the White House East Wing and Rose Garden in addition to the pillars of accountability based on the constitutional “checks and balances” between the three supposedly equal and independent branches of the federal government and between the federal government and the states.

The limestone he layered over the once beautiful White House Rose Garden figuratively functions as an expensive taxpayer-financed gravestone that Trump has placed at the head of a multicultural United States.

Donald Trump – who serves his puppet master, Stephen Miller, and other right-wing ideologues through the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” – pushes his image of the United States as a patriarchal heteronormative mainline Protestant white nationalist country.

And yes, this same project is equivalent to the German Nazis’ concept of the “Aryan” power state controlled by the Nietzschean Übermenschen over all others, the Letzter Menschen, also known as the subaltern – the marginalized, excluded from access to power.

As we are about to commemorate the 250^th birthday of the United States of America on July 4^th of this year, we stand at an inflection point in which we must decide as a nation whether we are truly unique among the nations across the globe organized and dedication to the philosophy of e pluribus unum, or whether we are maintained on the rule of a specific ethnicity, race, gender, sexual identity, or creed.

Ultimately, it is up to We the People!