One of the oddest footnotes to Donald Trump's presidential run—you know, the one in which he vowed to destroy the Affordable Care Act, waste billions of taxpayer dollars on a stupid wall, and ban members of an entire religion from the country—were his comparatively non-malevolent takes on LGBT issues. He conceded without argument that same-sex marriage is settled law, and shortly after his inauguration, he pledged to continue to enforce the Obama-era executive order that bars federal contractors from discriminating against employees based on sexual orientation. For a hot second, it looked like President Trump's campaign promise to do "everything in [his] power to protect to protect our LGBTQ citizens" might be legit after all.

I don't mean to shock you, but this unexpected wokeness has quickly proved to be illusory. This week, the President rescinded an executive order issued by President Obama that required federal contractors to demonstrate their compliance a host of federal antidiscrimination laws—including the executive order that President Trump vowed to leave in place. In other words, Trump isn't touching the antidiscrimination executive order, but he's nixing one that requires contractors to affirmatively demonstrate that they actually follow it.

Neil Gorsuch and the Senate's "Nuclear Option," Explained You have questions. We have answers.

Figuring that they are already on a roll in the "unraveling the already-flimsy patchwork of federal laws that protect LGBT Americans" department, this week the administration's Census Bureau has nixed questions about sexual orientation and gender identity from its list of planned data points for collection during the upcoming census. These categories appeared in a proposal submitted by the Bureau to Congress earlier this month, but in the final version, no dice.

To be fair, this information has not been gathered in previous censuses, which only occur every ten years. But in the run-up to the 2020 iteration, federal agencies had urged the Census Bureau to include these categories for the first time, since this information is critical to the agencies' ability to enforce the law. The National LGBT Task Force explained it this way: