Happy World AIDS Day to everyone except the United States. Actually, I don’t think that Happy World AIDS Day is the appropriate greeting, but currently, in this country, there is no appropriate greeting, as World AIDS Day doesn’t exist. Not under the second Trump Administration, anyway. For the first time in 37 years, the U.S. is not recognizing World AIDS Day.
“World AIDS Day has been commemorated on Dec. 1 every year since 1988,” reports The Advocate. “Organizations, businesses, and governments around the globe have recognized it. Both Republican and Democratic presidents have held World AIDS Day events or issued proclamations on it, including George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump in his first term, although he did not mention LGBTQ people. Last year, President Joe Biden hosted the first White House display of panels from the AIDS Memorial Quilt.”
The AIDS Memorial Quilt, for those of you who don’t know, is “considered the largest community arts project in history” and “helps us remember the unique lives and stories of those we’ve lost to HIV/AIDS.”
Or as the Trump Administration would describe it: “A woke arts and crafts project that celebrates a bunch of dead gays.”
In the decades since the quilt was started, we’ve come a long way when it comes to AIDS. For one thing, even though there is still no cure or vaccine, AIDS is no longer considered a death sentence. It’s now more of a manageable chronic illness in places where there is access to antiretroviral treatments. By and large, societal attitudes about AIDS have changed a lot since the 1980s.
Well, for some people, anyway. Back in the ‘80s, right-wing Christian conservatives thought AIDS was God’s retribution for the sin of homosexuality. When it was found that people who used intravenous drugs also contracted AIDS at a higher rate than the average population, conservatives were more than happy to lump them together with the homos as worthless and better off dead.
Sadly, the attitude of right-wing Christian conservatives hasn’t changed all that much in the last four decades. While currently their most prominent target is transgender people, the ‘80s panic about gays was driven by the same toxic mix of misogyny, homophobia, Christian Nationalism and the conservative insistence on “personal responsibility.”
And, look, personal responsibility isn’t a bad thing. But conservatives believe that personal responsibility absolves humans of having to take care of one another. If you fuck up, it’s your fault; you deal with the consequences. That’s why they hate social safety nets like Medicaid and food assistance so much. It’s a truly hateful way to live.
A perfect example is USAID. If you remember, one of the first things Trump did after taking office was to scrap USAID funding, basically declaring that offering aid to other countries was a waste of money.
A July 2025 article in Time reveals why: “For more than six decades, USAID has helped dozens of low- and middle-income countries, including conflict-stricken ones, to improve access to food, water, health care, and education. It’s helped stop disease outbreaks, revolutionise agricultural practices, and in some cases, promote democracy.”
No wonder Trump scrapped it. Right-wing Christians don’t even believe in helping homegrown Americans access food, water, health care, or education. RFK, Jr., who is an AIDS denialist, is actually promoting disease outbreaks (see: measles, whooping cough), and it’s clear that Trump has nothing but contempt for democracy.
By the way, the shuttering of USAID is expected to cause millions of deaths worldwide. And these people dare to call themselves pro-life.
Say what you want about Biden (and, believe me, I have many complaints), but when he brought the AIDS quilt to the White House, it was a BFD.
Oh, how things have changed.
fear, silence, discrimination, and stigma are official policy positions of the Trump Administration.
The quilt is part of the National AIDS Memorial, which is housed in San Francisco. According to AIDSMemorial.org, the quilt is part of their mission “to ensure that the lives of people who died from AIDS are never forgotten and the story of AIDS is known by future generations so that never again will a community be harmed because of fear, silence, discrimination, or stigma.”
But fear, silence, discrimination, and stigma are official policy positions of the Trump Administration and every Republican who supports him. It’s indefensible. And yet here we are. “Even if it is not surprising that the U.S. will remain silent on its own epidemic, it is still shameful,” Emily Bass, author of To End a Plague: America’s Fight to Defeat AIDS in Africa, wrote on Substack. “HIV is ongoing in America. The AIDS crisis is not over and is instead evolving, and we know, to our bones, that Silence=Death.”
No wonder the Trump Administration is trying so hard to shut people up.
