Ron Dicker
Tue, October 1, 2024
Donald Trump on Monday suggested “transgender” is the principal subject now taught in schools. He had a sympathetic ear in Fox Nation host Kellyanne Conway, his former adviser who introduced the world to the concept of “alternative facts.”
“We want reading, writing and arithmetic,” Trump said in a conversation about his plans for education reform if he wins the election next month. “Right now, you have mostly transgender. Everything’s transgender.”
“Some of these school programs, I looked at it the other night ― they’re destroying our country,” the former president added.
Trump prefaced his outrageous assertion ― yet another salvo in the culture wars ― by alluding to his plan to close the Department of Education and turn over education completely to the states. “And they’ll do great,” he said.
The Republican nominee noted that the U.S. spends more money per pupil than any other developed nation ― a claim that the data somewhat supports ― and yet is underperforming globally.
“We want school choice, but we have to get out of this Washington thing,” he said. “We’re gonna move it back to the states.”
The president has leaned on transphobia to characterize public schools as a breeding ground for extreme ideology on gender ― and his online plan for education reflects that.
Cutting federal funding “for any school or program pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children” is the top priority listed on that page.
The plan also lists “Keep men out of women’s sports” as a priority, another sign of the campaign’s embrace of transphobia.
Opinion
Trump Just Took His Project 2025 Promise a Step Further
Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling
Wed, October 2, 2024
Donald Trump has fleshed out his Project 2025–inspired Department of Education plan, and it involves handing the reins and lofty responsibilities of public school administration over to a group of people with all the time in the world: parents.
“I figure we’ll have like one person plus a secretary,” the Republican presidential nominee told a crowd in Milwaukee Tuesday night. “You’ll have a secretary to a secretary. We’ll have one person plus a secretary, and all the person has to do is, ‘Are you teaching English? Are you teaching arithmetic? What are you doing? Reading, writing, and arithmetic. And are you not teaching woke?’
“Not teaching woke is a big factor,” Trump continued. “We’ll have a very small staff. We can occupy that staff right in this room, actually I think this room is too large. And all they’re going to do is they’re going to see that the basics are taken care of. You know, we don’t want someone to get crazy and start teaching a language that we don’t want them to teach.”
Not only do parents already have enough on their plates without trying to run the public school system, it’s likely that Trump has a specific group of parents in mind to direct education policy.
The goals he lays out are startlingly akin to the policy points of the far-right “parents’ rights” group Moms for Liberty, who hosted Trump as the keynote speaker at their annual conference in September. Moms for Liberty has recently ingratiated itself significantly into national politics and was listed as a member of Project 2025’s advisory board.
In the same speech, Trump also drew attention to the amount of real estate occupied in D.C. by Department of Education buildings, plotting that the dissolution of the federal agency would allow “somebody else to move in.”
“They’re run by the state, and run by the parents, because in Washington—you know half of the buildings, such a large number, every building you pass in Washington says Department of Education,” Trump said. “You’re gonna have a lot of vacant space. Now we can have maybe somebody else move in.”
Trump’s proposal to dismantle the Department of Education wholesale is nearly identical to Project 2025, despite his campaign spending months trying to distance itself from the 920-page Christian nationalist manifesto.
Project 2025 has also proposed revisiting federal approval of the abortion pill, banning pornography nationwide, placing the Justice Department under the control of the president, slashing federal funds for climate change research in an effort to sideline mitigation efforts, and increasing funding for the U.S.-Mexico border wall.
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