WASHINGTON (States Newsroom) — Former President Donald Trump late Friday rarely touched on education issues during the third conference of Moms for Liberty, a conservative parental rights group that has ties to Project 2025, the far-right playbookTrump has tried to distance himself from.
Instead, in a more than one-hour interview with Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice, he gave lengthy commentary on immigration, the Afghanistan withdrawal, his false claim that he won the 2020 presidential election, his old TV show “The Apprentice;” and frustration at running against Democratic presidential nominee 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’re going into the classrooms … they don’t even speak English.”
Trump didn’t give details on how he would enact education policy changes at the federal level but said he was against public schools allowing transgender students to identify with their gender identity in the classroom.
Trump added that he was supportive of “parental rights” and the mission of Moms for Liberty, which supports vouchers for private school tuition, running for local school boards, and dismantling the U.S. Department of Education.
“I’m for parental rights all the way,” Trump said. “I don’t even understand the concept of not being.”
Across the campaign trail, Trump has also floated the idea that parents should be allowed to elect principals in public schools.
Trump attacked Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, and called her a “Marxist.” He added that he looked forward to debating her on Sept. 10 on ABC News.
The Harris campaign criticized Trump for speaking at the event.
“Donald Trump is celebrating the new school year by pushing his frightening Project 2025 agenda that would hurt kids and dismantle public education as we know it, while Vice President Harris helped deliver the largest public education investment in American history and is fighting for every child to have access to a good school and a shot at the American dream,” Joseph Costello, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign, 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 has stressed the need to address the student loan debt crisis while touting some of the debt forgiveness initiatives of the Biden administration.
During Friday’s interview, Justice took aim at the policies of Democratic vice presidential nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Walz is a former geography teacher who was the teacher adviser for his school’s first gay, straight alliance club in 1999. And as governor, he signed a bill into law making free school lunches available for students.
Justice raised a question about a bill Walz signed into law making Minnesota a safe haven for access to gender-affirming care.
Justice asked Trump what were some of the things he would be able to do as president because “there’s been an explosion in the number of children who identify as transgender, and children are being taught that they were born in the wrong body.”
“Well, you can do everything,” Trump said. “President has such power.”
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that presidents have immunity for some official acts in office.
Justice asked Trump what policies he would enact at the federal level to protect “parental rights,” such as school choice, which gives parents an option to enroll their children in a school other than the assigned public one, often using public funding to do so.
House Republicans already passed a similar bill last year, but it’s likely to go nowhere in the Senate, where Democrats hold a slim majority.
Trump said that Republicans are “the party of common sense.”
“I mean, we’re conservative,” he said. “All of these things we’re talking about, no men in women’s sports, no gender operation, I mean, it’s these operations, it’s crazy.”
Project 2025 ties
This is the second time Trump has attended a Moms for Liberty conference, and while he embraces their culture war issues, the former present has not made “parental rights” a predominant issue in his reelection campaign.
Instead, he has centered his campaign on immigration and on the promise of undertaking mass deportations of undocumented people. During the interview, he mainly criticized the Biden administration over its immigration policies.
Moms for Liberty has strong GOP ties, appearing at the Republican National Convention this summer in Milwaukee. It has more than 130,000 members across 300 chapters in 48 states, according to the organization.
The group considers the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that wrote Project 2025, a key sponsor. Moms for Liberty also sits on an advisory board for Project 2025, which Trump has tried to distance from his campaign as Democrats highlight his ties to the aggressive conservative playbook.
The Heritage Foundation put together several sessions during the Moms for Liberty summit, one by Lindsey Burke, the director of the Center for Education Policy at the think tank. She was the lead author on the Department of Education section of Project 2025 that calls to abolish the agency. Another Heritage session was titled: “Boyhood and the Changing Role of the Man in American Life.”
While Moms for Liberty rose to prominence in 2021 amid the coronavirus pandemic, with a focus on public schools and culture war topics, its hold on local school board elections has started to wane.
In school board election races last year, candidates endorsed by the group underperformed, with fewer than one-third winning their races, according to an analysis from the left-leaning think tank, the Brookings Institution.
Moms for Liberty also announced a $3 million campaign and advertising blitz in key states with a focus on local school board elections in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin — all battleground states.
The group, which is a nonprofit, started in Florida and was at the forefront of pushing against mask mandates during school reopenings, eliciting book bans and challenges, and objections to structural racism being discussed in classrooms.
With the new Title IX regulations from the Biden administration, the group filed lawsuits against the new rules, which broaden sex discrimination to include gender ideology and sexual orientation, and give protections to transgender students.
While Moms for Liberty quickly rose on the far right, the organization has had its share of controversy, from its co-founder to local chapters.
Police records from a now-closed criminal investigation allege that Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler helped her husband, former Florida GOP chairperson Christian Ziegler, look for women the couple could have sexual relations with, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
Authorities were investigating Christian Ziegler for allegedly illegally filming a woman who accused him of sexual assault, but the state attorney’s office in Sarasota announced in March that it would not pursue charges.
A local chapter in Indiana had to apologize for using a quote by former Nazi leader Adolf Hilter in a newsletter to members, and two Kentucky chapter leaders were removed after posing in a photo with the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group.
