Trump candidate rages against marriage equality while calling LGBTQ+ people an “existential threat”

“Pride is one of the seven deadly sins,” he said. “I’m all for bringing back shame.”

Martin O’Donnell, a Trump-endorsed Republican and the composer of music for popular video games like Halo and Destiny, is challenging a Democratic incumbent in a race that could decide control of the House in the midterms. He called LGBTQ+ people part of the abyss that America is facing, in a video clip shared on X last Friday.

“Talk about an existential threat,” O’Donnell said when asked about his vision for the country. “This is where we are right now. We are on the cliff, looking down into the abyss. And the abyss is Marxism, it’s anti-Western philosophy. There’s this weird alliance of all these groups that like to pretend like they’re oppressed. So, the LGBTQ+ people, the Islamists, the Marxists, they’re all together now.”

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Halo video game announcer was asked to say “Trans rights.” He went well beyond that.

O’Donnell won the Republican primary after Trump’s endorsement and is running against Democrat Susie Lee in Nevada’s 3^rd Congressional district in a hope of a seat in the House of Representatives. Lee has held the seat since 2019 and it has been held by a Democrat since 2017. However, the seat has been held by Republican representatives for 12 years since the district was established in 2003.

With the House held on a narrow margin, the election in the swing state of Nevada will be one to watch in November.

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O’Donnell has retweeted a video of the interview and claimed that “If you watch the clip, I clearly said that Marxists are an existential threat to our constitutional republic.” He goes on to say “The left is lying about the things I say because they know we’re running a strong campaign. Susie Lee knows her days in Congress are numbered.” His statement appears to contradict the recording he shared.

His comments coming both during his run for the Nevada seat and ahead of the July 28 release of the remake of the original Halo: Campaign Evolved. Social media users have been dismayed to see what has happened to the man that composed the soundtrack.

However, O’Donnell’s latest comments on the community are in line with his past attacks on “woke” ideology, DEI practices, and the LGBTQ+ community.

During the same interview, he went on to say that “Pride is one of the seven deadly sins,” mocking the community’s celebration of public existence. “It’s always cracked me up that Pride is the big banner for the woke. I’m all for bringing back shame.”

Last year, he wrote a blog post claiming that gamers must “fight back” against DEI in games and claimed that “It’s hard for gamers to immerse themselves in a game when they are required to choose a ‘body type’ instead of gender and provide pronouns for their character at the start.” His comments reference games like Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Halo Infinite. Those games allow you to select your body type and voice independently from any gender selection, a form of storytelling and accessibility that has been lauded by many players, but denigrated by a vocal minority.

He has complains at length about the “infiltration of DEI in the industry,” saying, “The embrace of DEI led to a stoic hero such as Master Chief to becoming a weak, self-doubting shell of the character that made him, and Halo, so popular to begin with. And don’t get me started on that  rainbow armor.”

O’Donnell was fired by Bungie in 2014 and went on to co-found his own studio, Highwire Games.

The Advocate scoured O’Donnell’s past podcast episodes and noted that in a June 2025 episode of The Marty O’Donnell Show, he brought on the Liberty University executive Ryan Helfenbein. O’Donnell agreed with Helfenbein when he promoted longstanding lies about the LGBTQ+ community turning children gay.

“One thing you need to understand about the LGBT movement is they don’t reproduce. They recruit,” Helfenbein said as O’Donnell agreed. “And they’re going to take your children from you.”

In April 2025, he also complained that LGBTQ+ people had “co-opted” the rainbow and said that they need to “figure out a way to take those things back,” setting up an adversarial position with the community, saying “It is an us-versus-them thing.”

In earlier tweets, O’Donnell also provided support for Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation created manifesto that drove Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign and that continues to target LGBTQ+ and women’s rights.

He went on to protest same-sex marriage, claiming that marriage is “defined as a union of one man and one woman,” and saying that it isn’t just “a Christian definition.”

O’Donnell has clearly held these views for a long time. Reddit user lady_haybear compiled a list six years ago of O’Donnell’s alt-right views. Those included complaining about not pushing binary gender on babies, opposing Gillette’s ad campaign that pushed back on normalized sexual assault, and a Bungie podcast from 2007 where he was “described as the most right-leaning person at the company.”

O’Donnell’s campaign site does not make reference to any of these comments and opinions on LGBTQ+ people. The swing state candidate focuses on the affordability crisis and says he focuses on “families first.” He doesn’t say which families he thinks should be first, but he has seemingly kept his public commentary about those issues for right-wing talk shows and his X account.

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