Following directly on the heels of ultra-right-wing (“Alt Right”) former executive chair of Breitbart News, Steven Bannon, joining the Donald Trump campaign team, now former Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann has announced that Trump has tapped her to advise his campaign on foreign policy issues.

Bachmann is notorious for her uninformed and bigoted pronouncements on LGBT people and Muslims. Her accumulated playlist of whacked out drivel and lies is unending, though I have my favorites.

Though entirely untrue, she vomited:

“The president of the United States [Obama] will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day. He’s taking 2,000 people with him. He will be renting out over 870 rooms in India. And these are five-star hotel rooms at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. This is the kind of over-the-top spending.”

And who can ever forget her U.S. history lesson:

“What I love about New Hampshire and what we have in common is our extreme love for liberty. You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord.”

And on her vehement opposition to the Affordable Care Act:

“This cannot pass. What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn’t pass.”

When asked by Jane Schmidt, student coordinator of the Gay/Straight Alliance at Waverly High School in Waverly, Iowa on November 30, 2011 “Why can’t same-sex couples get married [throughout the United States]?,” as then a Republican Presidential candidate, Michele Bachmann responded that gay and lesbian people should have “no special rights” to marry people of the same sex, insisting that “the laws are you marry a person of the opposite sex.”

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She added: “They can get married, but they abide by the same law as everyone else. They can marry a man if they’re a woman. Or they can marry a woman if they’re a man.”

Bachmann has represented same-sex attractions and sexuality as a “disorder” and as “sexual dysfunction” that encourages child abuse and “enslavement.” Her husband, Marcus, has been roundly criticized for his so-called “conversion therapy” (“praying away the gay”) practices at his Minnesota counseling center.

Michele’s Iowa presidential primary co-chair, Tamara Scott, was recorded as asserting that the legalization of marriage for same-sex couples would ultimately lead to people marrying turtles and inanimate objects, like the Eiffel Tower.

At the Circus:

The very first thing that caught my eye as I entered the grounds of the Iowa Republican Party Presidential Straw Poll on August 13, 2011 were three young children, I would guess between the ages of 4 -7, wearing day-glow orange baseball caps with “NRA” scrawled atop, and round stickers on announcing “GUNS SAVE LIVES” on their small tee-shirts.

The Straw Poll was held a mere three blocks from my home in Ames, Iowa and upon the campus of Iowa State University where I taught between 2004 – 2013.

I saw Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee grinning shoulder-to-shoulder for the line of press cameras.

Inside Herman Cain’s tent, the candidate led a religious-style revival meeting proclaiming “Just like we do in the Southern Baptist church, say ‘Amen!’ Everybody shout ‘Amen.’ Now again, shout ‘Amen.’ And again, shout ‘Amen.’ That’s how it’s done!”

A singer on stage in front of Ron Paul’s tent sang the Bob Dylan classic “The Times They Are A Changin’,” and literally changed the lyric to “…Come senators, congressmen, Please heed the call, Don’t stand in the doorway, Don’t block Ron Paul….”

Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley took the stage in the “Soapbox” tent and talked how the Tea Party speaks for a new and exciting grassroots movement that is taking back the government for the people. So is Grassley from the grassroots too?

Singers on the Tea Party stage crooned themes of small government and, in particular, issues of liberty and freedom in front of their enormous and imposing red, white, and blue sign “Guns, God, and the Constitution.” I could imagine pick-up trucks circling with their weight-distribution hitches.

And tables representing every imaginable conservative organization from the Heritage Foundation to the Faith and Freedom Coalition distributed information, food, soft drinks, and plenty of political memorabilia.

As I walked through the extensive crowd, this virtual sea of white faces — old, young, and in between — and as I saw the staffs of a relatively large group of presidential hopefuls lobbying my Iowa neighbors for their votes, I was conscious of a unanimity of message, a virtual lock-step of thought and expression of ideas.

Then I saw Marcus Bachmann, husband of presidential candidate Michele Bachmann. Before he had a chance to read my tee-shirt, (“It’s OK With Me” written beneath a picture of two men, a man and woman, and two women), I asked him if I could have my picture taken with him by my friend and out gay man who was also running for presidential nomination of the Republican Party.

I then asked Marcus about his controversial recorded statements in reference to LGBT people as “barbarians who needed to be educated’ and ‘disciplined’,” but most importantly about his so-called “psychotherapeutic” practices when “treating” LGBT people at his Minnesota counseling center. He then looked down at my tee-shirt.

First, he proclaimed, “I like homosexuals, and I never called homosexuals ‘barbarians.” Though this is what he clearly called LGBT people in a recorded interview on a radio station, I asked him “to please refer to us as ‘lesbian,’ ‘gay,’ ‘bisexual,’ and ‘transgender’ people rather than ‘homosexuals.’”

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He replied: “‘Homosexual’ is my word, and that is the word I will use.”

I then told him that I do not appreciate that his wife, Michele, promoted her political career by stepping on the bodies of LGBT people when she proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives a Constitutional amendment requiring the institution of legal marriage to include only one man and one woman. Is this, I asked Marcus, “liking homosexuals” as he had previously claimed?

At that point, he simply accused me of being misinformed, and his political handler led him away.

The political and theocratic Right has very skillfully manipulated the language and the discourse in its concentration of so-called “social issues” and, thereby, the demonization of those who favor women’s reproductive freedoms, LGBT rights, stem cell research, those who warn of the human component in global climate change, those who advocate for gun control, for universal health care, for police to be more responsible to the people in the communities in which they serve, and those who support comprehensive immigration reform, among many other issues.

So what does this tell us about Donald Trump who now relies on Michele Bachmann for advice on foreign policy? Actually, not much more than we already know about Trump.

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Photo: Getty Images