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During a campaign stop at Knockout Barber in the Bronx on Thursday, former president Donald Trump called transgender children a “threat to democracy” during rambling comments about education, the economy, and the Southern border. The footage, which aired on Fox News Monday, has swiftly gone viral.
When asked to talk about how to improve school systems in the Bronx, Trump instead began to speak about a pet issue of his, which is also part of the Project 2025 agenda: demolishing the Department of Education. (Don’t worry, he brought it back to trans kids.)
“I want one person and a secretary to just make sure they’re teaching English,” he said of his intentions for the Department of Education. “Reading, writing and arithmetic. No transgender, no operations. You know, they take your kid. There are some places, your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl. Without parental consent. What’s that about?”
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Finally, he pivoted to a favorite couplet: “They talk about a threat to democracy? They’re a threat to democracy.” It was unclear — and, of course, no one asked Trump a follow-up question — whether Trump was saying that trans kids, public schools, Democrats, or the Department of Education were the real threats to democracy.
Despite the fact that his false claim of “sex changes” taking place in schools has been repeatedly debunked, Trump went on to insist that was “actually happening,” which, again, is a blatant lie.
Trump’s falsehoods regarding gender-affirming care in school are just one part of an anti-LGBTQ+ fear mongering playbook he has followed in an attempt to get back to the White House. Last week, Trump posted a new ad that featured scenes from Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 classic about the horrors of war and the dehumanization of soldiers, interspersed with images of drag queens as well as assistant U.S. Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine, who is transgender. The ad was posted with the all-caps caption, “WE WILL NOT HAVE A WOKE MILITARY!’
Earlier in the barbershop campaign stop, someone asked Trump about the border between the United States and Mexico. Trump responded by saying that, “the border to me is the fabric of our country.”
“We had the strongest border in recorded history,” he said. Throwing in a statistic that had absolutely nothing to do with the border the United States shares with Mexico, Trump said, “Last week, we had 13,099 convicted murderers released from jails all over the world. It’s not South America, it’s all over the world.”
Trump has repeated this lie several times, first at a campaign rally in Waunakee, Wisconsin. Trump’s claim comes from a flagrant misinterpretation of a letter from ICE director Patrick J. Lechleitner in which he pointed out that 13,099 people convicted of homicide were on ICE’s non-detained docket. However, that does not mean that these people are currently free in America, nor that they were let in during the Biden administration. Many of them are detained in facilities not run by ICE.
Later, when responding to a question about the economy, Trump blamed President Biden’s policies on oil for the stagnant economy and reassured people in the room that his policy would be to “drill, baby, drill.” Despite the political left’s alignment with climate change and green energy policies, the United States has actually hit an all-time record for oil production in the world under president Biden, producing 13 million barrels a day.
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