Trump Responds To Voter’s Question About Schools With A Bunch Of Utter Nonsense
During a recent visit to a New York barbershop, Donald Trump was asked for his solution to improving schools in the Bronx. His rambling, hard-to-interpret answer quickly devolved into a conspiracy theory.
“Mr. President, I have a 5-year-old son that’s in public schools right now. I have a lot of people asking me questions, as far as the failing school systems that we have here in the Bronx,” Javier Rodriguez, the co-owner of Knockout Barber, told the former president during the town hall-like event. “What are we going to do to improve that and our school systems?”
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Trump replied:
Well, we’re moving them back from Washington, where you have people that don’t care about New York, frankly. You know, in Washington, I don’t know if you ever noticed that you got Department of Education, Department of Education. You got half the buildings are Department of Education. I never saw. You don’t need any of them. You know, I want one person and a secretary to just make sure they’re teaching English. OK? Give a little English, OK? I say reading, writing and arithmetic. No transgender, no operations. You know, they take your kid. There are some places — your boy leaves the school, comes back a girl, OK? Without parental consent. What is that all about? That’s like, that’s when they talk about a threat to democracy, they’re a threat.
While the Republican nominee’s stream-of-consciousness spiel is tough to decipher, it seems he was initially referring to his vow to shut down the Department of Education and “move everything back to the states.” Previously, he has similarly articulated his vision of having “one person plus a secretary” at the agency who will ensure that English, reading, writing and arithmetic are prioritized over “teaching woke.”
The next part of his response centered on his baseless, fearmongering lie that children are somehow obtaining gender-affirming surgeries at school.
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He’s repeated it multiple times, and it’s been debunked and widely panned as hateful and divisive, not to mention completely absurd. His own campaign couldn’t come up with any evidence to support his claim when pressed by CNN last month.
“This utter BS. At what point do we stop dumbing ourselves down with the mind-numbingly stupid crap that comes out of @realDonaldTrump mouth—the lies, the stunts, the othering of our fellow Americans,” Michael Steele, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, said of Trump’s latest iteration of the lie on social media. “He is unfit to serve as our president. He IS a danger to the values we purport as a nation.”
Trump visited the Knockout Barber on Thursday, and the forum was shown on “Fox & Friends” Monday. Rodriguez told The New York Post he voted for Trump in the last two elections but hasn’t yet decided how he’ll cast his ballot next month.
