WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump made a infrequent mention of education Friday night during the third conference of Moms for Liberty, a conservative parenting rights group with ties to the 2025 Project, a far-right textbook from which Trump has tried to distance himself.
Instead, in a more than hour-long interview with Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice, he offered extensive commentary on immigration, the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, his false claim that he won the 2020 presidential election, his venerable TV show “The Apprentice” and his frustrations with running against Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris instead of President Joe Biden.
“Our country is being poisoned,” Trump said of migrants and their children in public schools. “And your schools and your children are suffering greatly because they are going into the classrooms… they don’t even speak English.”
Trump did not provide details on how he intends to implement changes to education policy at the federal level, but he has said he opposes public schools allowing transgender students to identify with their gender identity in the classroom.
Trump added that he supports “parental rights” and the mission of Moms for Liberty, which supports private school vouchers, running for local school boards and abolishing the U.S. Department of Education.
“I am all for parental rights,” Trump said. “I don’t even understand the concept of nonexistence.”
During the election campaign, Trump also put forward the idea that parents should have the opportunity to elect directors in public schools.
Trump attacked Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, calling her a “Marxist.” He added that he could not wait debating her on September 10 on ABC News.
Harris’ campaign criticized Trump for his speech at the event.
“Donald Trump is celebrating the new school year by pushing his horrific Project 2025 agenda that would harm kids and dismantle public education as we know it, while Vice President Harris helped deliver the largest investment in public education in American history and is fighting to make sure every child has access to a good school and a chance to pursue the American dream,” Harris campaign spokesman Joseph Costello said in a statement.
Harris has said little about education policy on the campaign trail. But during her campaign speeches, she has opposed book bans and emphasized the need to address the student loan debt crisis while also touting some of the Biden administration’s debt relief initiatives.
During an interview Friday, Justice criticized the policies of Democratic vice presidential candidate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Walz is a former geography teacher who was a teacher advisor for his school’s first gay and straight ally club in 1999. As governor, he signed legislation that allowed students to eat free school lunches.
Judge Justice raised the issue of a law signed by Walz that makes Minnesota a protected haven for access to gender-sensitive health care.
Justice asked Trump what he would do as president because “there has been a dramatic increase in the number of children identifying as transgender and children being taught that they were born in the wrong body.”
“Well, you can do anything,” Trump said. “The president has that power.”
Last month, the United States Supreme Court ruled that presidents have immunity to perform certain official official duties.
Justice asked Trump what policies he would implement at the federal level to protect “parental rights,” such as school choice, which gives parents the ability to enroll their children in a school other than their assigned public school, often using public funds.
Republicans in the House of Representatives passed a similar bill last year.But it likely will have no effect in the Senate, where Democrats have a slim majority.
Trump said Republicans are the “party of common sense.”
“I mean, we’re conservative,” he said. “All these things we’re talking about, no men in women’s sports, no sex surgeries, I mean, these surgeries, it’s crazy.”
Project 2025 involves
Trump is attending the Moms for Liberty conference for the second time, and while he supports culture war issues, he has not made “parental rights” a central issue of his re-election campaign.
Instead, he focused his campaign on immigration and promise to carry out mass deportations undocumented people. During the interview, he mainly criticized the Biden administration for its immigration policies.
Moms for Liberty has sturdy ties to the Republican Partyappearing at the Republican National Convention this summer in Milwaukee. It has more than 130,000 members in 300 chapters in 48 states, according to the organization.
The group counts the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that wrote Project 2025, as a key backer. Moms for Liberty also sits on the advisory board of Project 2025which Trump sought to distance himself from during his campaign, as Democrats highlighted his ties to aggressive conservative tactics.
The Heritage Foundation hosted several sessions during the Moms for Liberty Summit, one of which was led by Lindsey Burke, director of the think tank’s Center for Education Policy. was the lead author of the Department of Education section of Project 2025 calls for the abolition of the agency. The next Heritage session was titled: “Boyhood and the Changing Role of the Man in American Life.”
While the Moms for Liberty movement gained traction in 2021 amid the coronavirus pandemic, focusing on public schools and culture war topics, its influence in local school board elections has begun to wane.
In last year’s school council elections, candidates supported by the group performed poorly, with less than a third of them winning their racesAccording to an analysis by the left-wing think tank Brookings Institution.
Moms for Liberty also announced a $3 million campaign and a massive advertising campaign in key states, with a focus on local school board elections in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin — key campaign battleground states.
The nonprofit group started in Florida and has been on the front lines of fighting mask mandates as schools reopened, causing book bans and challengesand objections to discussions about structural racism in schools.
With the recent Title IX regulations put in place by the Biden administration, the group filed lawsuits against the recent ruleswhich expand gender discrimination to include gender ideology and sexual orientation, and also provide protections for transgender students.
While the Moms for Liberty movement has quickly gained popularity on the far right, the organization has not escaped its share of controversy, from its co-founder to its local chapters.
Police records from a now-closed criminal investigation show that Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler helped her husband, former Florida Republican Party Chairman Christian Ziegler, find women for the couple to have sex with, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
Authorities had been investigating Christian Ziegler for allegedly illegally filming a woman who accused him of sexual assault, but the Sarasota District Attorney’s Office announced in March that it did not intend to pursue charges.
The local branch in Indiana was forced to apologize using a quote from former Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in the members’ newsletter and Two Kentucky chapter leaders removed after posing for a photo with the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group.
