Former US President Donald Trump has called for the dissolution of the Department of Education over the dispute over sex education in schools. “We should abolish the Department of Education,” Trump said on Saturday (local time) at a conference of right-wing conservatives in Dallas, Texas.
The audience then erupted in cheers. “You can’t teach the Bible, but you can teach children that America is evil and that men can get pregnant,” Trump said. He called for strict bans on teaching “inappropriate” content to schoolchildren.
In the United States, there is currently talk of a veritable culture war surrounding issues of gender identity. Conservatives seek to curtail the rights of the LGBTQIA community. The English abbreviation stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans people, queer, intersex and asexual people. In several states, Republicans have passed discriminatory laws.
Schools are also repeatedly targeted by the conservatives – books that are said to be too suggestive or politically inconsistent with their worldview are banned from the classroom. A Florida school law bans the topics of “sexual orientation or gender identity” from kindergarten through third grade and restricts it for older students.
Just a few weeks ago, Trump’s then Minister of Education made a statement similar to Trump’s. The Department of Education shouldn’t exist, Betsy Devos had said. During her time in government, the billionaire entrepreneur from Michigan had worked primarily to reduce the influence of the department as much as possible.
When Trump brought up the subject of sexual identity and school, the crowd at the Dallas conference went especially loud. “No teacher should be allowed to teach our children about transgender issues without parental consent,” Trump said. There should be no “left gender theory” in the military either, he added. “The world is too dangerous for America’s armed forces to be politically correct. You see what is happening with China and Russia.”
As in the past, Trump spoke as the keynote speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference. It’s sort of a melting pot for Trump supporters, the religious right, and conspiracy theorists. In his two-hour speech in front of around 1,000 people, Trump repeated well-known things.
He also received a lot of applause on topics such as migration or when he repeated his lie about electoral fraud. He again called for the death penalty for drug dealers.
Trump again flirted with running again in the 2024 presidential election – but did not announce his candidacy. “Now we may have to do it again. We may have to do it again,” he said. Trump makes this statement in almost every speech – and gets a lot of applause for it.
