Brian Glenn, boyfriend of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and a conservative media personality, used a press conference in the Oval Office this week to push an extraordinary request: he asked former President Donald Trump to designate an imaginary group as a terrorist organization so the Trans Pride flag could be barred from public display.
Glenn, a former local TV anchor who has since remade himself as a right-wing commentator, has become a fixture in Trump’s political orbit, often appearing with Greene at campaign rallies and conservative media events. His question at the press conference was not treated as out of bounds. It reflected how attempts to frame transgender people and their symbols as dangerous have become normalized within the Trump movement.
Trump’s response suggested he understood the constitutional barriers. “Well, I wouldn’t be, then they’ll sue and they’ll get freedom of speech,” he said, acknowledging that courts have long protected symbolic expression as a form of free speech. While Trump stopped short of endorsing the proposal, the fact that the exchange took place during an official press event underscored how anti-trans rhetoric is now comfortably aired in spaces of political power.
The language Glenn used recalls the messaging of his partner. In 2023, Greene warned of so-called “Transtifa riots,” claiming they were part of a plot for “men replacing women.” The term never described a real movement, but it served as a way to cast transgender identity as a looming threat. Glenn’s press conference comments appear to carry that same fiction forward, reframing the Trans Pride flag itself as a symbol of extremism.
The timing makes the exchange even more striking. Days earlier, Monica Helms, the Navy veteran who created the Trans Pride flag in 1999, announced that she and her wife planned to leave the United States due to escalating anti-trans laws and hostility in Georgia. Her departure highlighted the human cost of the climate Glenn and Greene have helped fuel. While the flag’s creator prepared to flee for safety, Glenn was asking whether the flag should be treated as a terrorist emblem.
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For transgender Americans, the pattern is familiar: invent a dangerous-sounding label, connect it to trans identity, and use it to justify legal or cultural erasure. Even if banning the flag would collapse in court, the normalization of the idea shifts public perception, encouraging the view that trans pride is not simply controversial but dangerous.
Glenn’s question was not dismissed as fringe. It was asked in the Oval Office, in front of Trump, during a press event meant to signal priorities. That is what makes it significant, not the likelihood of a flag ban, but the willingness of political allies to cast transgender visibility itself as a national security issue.
The Trans Pride flag does not represent terrorism. It represents resilience, community, and survival. And that is precisely what some in Trump’s circle would prefer to erase from public life.
