But what precisely had he said? And what were those cheers really for? Hindsight tells a story different from the one at the time.

The T refers to transgender people, and several of my Times colleagues reported last weekend that the Department of Health and Human Services is proposing that gender be defined strictly within federal civil rights law “as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with.” This move follows other efforts by the Trump administration to marginalize transgender people. The president, for example, has tried to bar them from military service but has been rebuffed by courts.

Meanwhile the Justice Department, under the direction of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has argued that anti-discrimination protections in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 should not extend to gay people. The Obama administration took the opposite tack.

How, then, to interpret Trump’s convention speech in retrospect? One takeaway is that those remarks were classic campaign-trail drivel, neither deeply felt nor remotely prophetic. Another is that Trump hadn’t yet committed firmly to a low-road approach of pleasing hard-core fans on the far right at the possible expense of less durable supporters in the middle.

But another is that his words at the convention — re-examine them closely — weren’t about L.G.B.T. people, whom he didn’t promise to protect, period. He was focused on what he has frequently called “radical Islamic” beliefs and terror, and was saying that gay people needn’t fear the spread of those into America on his watch. He probably feels that he made good on his pledge with the successive versions of his Muslim travel ban.