‘What the hell is wrong with our country?’: Donald Trump gives a jarringly transphobic answer to questions about America’s school system
Donald Trump believes some pretty strange things about school and education. He promised back in September that he would shut down the Department of Education in order to “stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth with all sorts of things that you don’t want to have our youth hearing.” By which he means, of course, LGBTQ+ education and accurate discussion of America’s racist past.
Exactly what Trump’s plan is after shutting down the Department of Education, he didn’t say. He doesn’t seem to have a lot of plans at all really—all he’s got is racism, misogyny and transphobia. And speaking of transphobia, he’s extremely fixated on a lie that doesn’t even make sense: that school children are somehow being given sex-change operations in schools.
Trump said as much in a characteristically rambling, vague speech at a Bronx barbershop this week. After repeating the works “Department of Education” multiple times, seemingly to make a point, he said, “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?”
Yeah, what IS that all about? There is no school in the United States or anywhere else that will take a child in, give them life-changing surgery and send them back home. The logistics are impossible! Does Trump seriously think that every school comes with medical equipment and a surgery team just hiding in the basement? Does he think—you know what, he doesn’t think at all. His brain is rotted by hate. But the worrying thing is that his supporters believe the lies he feed them, and genuinely think that children are being sent to school for gender reassignment surgery. Yes, it sounds stupid that anyone would believe that, but here we are.
Trump has repeated this lie before and it’s so, so tiresome. Back in September he said at a rally in Wisconsin, “Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” What indeed. Trump and the Republican party have never been able to produce a child who was given an operation at school, because it doesn’t happen.
It’s things like this that make people doubt if Trump has the cognitive ability to be president. He gives long nonsensical speeches, he puts on music and sways when he should be talking, and he thinks schools are taking kids and giving them operations. It really boggles the mind that some people want to see him in the White House again.
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