Pride Month Is a Little Subdued This Year, but Did Donald Trump Cancel It?

For decades, June has been a month when LGBTQ+ people can celebrate their identity and the communities they've forged around it. This year, though, many of the companies that have gotten in on the action in order to monetize Pride have been a little quieter than normal.

That, coupled with President Trump's return to the White House and a viral video in which he appears to announce that Pride is canceled, has led some people to wonder whether the president actually put an official end to Pride Month. Here's what we know.

A video that has gone viral on X (formerly Twitter) appears to show Trump in the Oval Office announcing the cancellation of Pride Month.

"It is with great pleasure that I am announcing that Pride Month is canceled. Pride is a sin ... instead June will be known as confidence month or maybe just June," Trump says in the video, before going on to say some things about gay sex that are quite evidently homophobic.

If you don't stay until the end of the video, though, you might miss the text that says, "This is a deepfake, but let people dream.”

Clearly, then, the video and what Trump says in it are not real, although the AI that created it was good enough to convince some people. Trump has not said anything much at all about Pride Month, and it seems very unlikely that he would cancel it (it's also unclear what that would mean even if he did it, since Pride is not a government holiday).

Although Trump has not taken the step of canceling Pride, his administration is pursuing policies that target queer people, with a particular emphasis on transgender individuals. Trump's administration has banned transgender women in sports, transgender troops in the military, and has taken steps to limit federal recognition to two genders. Those policies have led to concrete harms and have isolated the trans community.

So, while Trump hasn't taken the frankly cartoonishly villainous step of canceling Pride Month, he has put in place policies that seem designed to harm those in the LGBTQ+ community. Trump and his allies would argue that these trans individuals are either mentally unwell, receiving some sort of preferential treatment, or both, but in reality, all they're trying to do is live their lives.

Trans people's right to exist is under fairly constant threat from this administration, and just because he didn't cancel any official celebrations of queerness does not mean that Trump or his administration embrace these ideas. If their policies are to be taken at face value, they at least want to make the lives of trans people incredibly uncomfortable.

Don't believe everything you see on the internet. Trump and his administration have not canceled Pride. Just because Pride is still happening, though, doesn't mean that queer identity has been embraced by the president or those around him.