Heard the hilarious joke about the vice-president of the United States wanting to hang all gay people? Ah, no, my mistake. It wasn’t a joke – it was just another day in the increasingly regressive states of Trumpinistan.

Earlier this week the New Yorker reported that, during a White House discussion on gay rights, Donald Trump glibly said that Mike Pence, who has been accused of supporting conversion therapy for LGBT people, “wants to hang them all”. After some bad press, Trump denied ever saying this.

One suspects, of course, that not only did Trump say it, but that he himself would happily preside over televised hangings of gay people if he thought it would get him good ratings. One also suspects that, even as the first episode of The Hanging Apprentice went live on air, you’d still find some gay conservatives eager to explain that Trump is good for the LGBT community really.

Trump, you see, does have a fanbase among the LGBT community. While only 14% of gay Americans voted for him (it’s hard to get data on trans voters), he’s galvanised very vocal support among an influential group of gay, white, and financially well-off men.

In February, for example, Chadwick Moore, a 33-year-old gay journalist who controversially profiled the deeply odious Milo Yiannopoulos in Out magazine, “came out” as sympathetic to Trump in a New York Post piece. Moore is just one example of a wider trend of gay people, emboldened by the likes of self-described “dangerous faggot” Yiannopoulos, to publicly and vociferously air their prejudices or pledge their allegiance to the racist, sexist and increasingly homophobic Trump administration.

“2017 is really the year that LGBT conservatives came out of the closet,” Gregory T Angelo, the president of Log Cabin Republicans, told me. LCR describes itself as America’s “largest Republican organization dedicated to representing LGBT conservatives and allies”, and Angelo has been active within the organization for almost a decade. Read more via the Guardian