Sean Spicer’s Book: Trump’s Pro-LGBT Message At 2016 Convention Was Paul Manafort’s Plot To Silence Critics

People Magazine reports:

When Donald Trump promised at the 2016 Republican National Convention to “do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens,” it was heralded as an unprecedented declaration by a GOP presidential nominee — and a sign of hope that Trump would prove more moderate in his gay-rights policies than his party platform.

Two years and multiple anti-LGBTQ policies later, a new book by his former press secretary Sean Spicer reveals that the sentence in Trump’s convention speech was nothing more than empty payback for a political favor.

In The Briefing: Politics, The Press, and The President, out Tuesday, Spicer writes that Trump’s campaign team was on a mission at the time to derail anti-Trump delegates seeking to prevent Trump from becoming the Republican presidential nominee — a process that “Never Trumpers” had initiated by signing a petition ahead of the Republican convention.

The Advocate reports:

“[Trump campaign chairman Paul] Manafort and his lieutenants went one by one down the list of people who had signed the petition and persuaded them to remove their signatures,” Spicer writes. The last one to be removed was that of Robert Sinners, a delegate from Washington, D.C.

Sinners told Jason Miller, Trump’s senior communications adviser, that he wanted the nominee to support LGBT rights. “Jason assured Sinners that Trump would be the most ‘inclusive’ candidate the Republican Party ever had,” Spicer writes.

“Jason told Sinners Donald Trump’s acceptance speech would acknowledge the LGBT community, which no other Republican acceptance speech had done,” the former press secretary continues. “And it did.”