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Donald Trump falsely claimed yet again that children are the subject of “brutal” gender operations at schools across the US.
“Kamala supports states being able to take minor children and perform sex change operations, take them away from their parents, perform sex change operations, and send them back home,” Trump said in Mosinee, Wisconsin on Saturday afternoon.
“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,” he added. “Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?”
There’s no evidence this has ever happened or been planned. In states where gender-affirming surgery is legal for people under the age of 18, parental consent is required.
Trump made a similar false claim while speaking to the conservative group Moms for Liberty last week.
“The transgender thing is incredible. Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child,” he falsely claimed.
An adolescent medicine physician at the Yale School of Medicine, Dr Meredithe McNamara, told CNN on Monday that “everything in this statement is false.”
“Of course surgery of any kind happens in a qualified medical center and not in a school. Of course, parents are the medical decision-makers for their kids, especially when it comes to gender-affirming care,” she added.
Pediatrician Michael O’Brien reacted to Trump’s rally speech on Saturday night, writing on X: “I cannot overstate this… if you are afraid that your child is going to have a gender-affirming surgery at school but you aren’t afraid they may be shot at school, there is no way we’re living in the same nation.”
“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 doesn’t come back because of a guy armed with an AR-15? Because that actually happens, all across this country,” actor George Takei wrote.
Trump continued his rambling performance by bashing Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as “Tampon Tim,” a moniker used widely by rightwingers.
“Did you see signed a bill where tampons will be in every boy's bathroom? ... He's a whack job,” Trump said of Walz on Saturday.
Walz rose to prominence as he appeared on cable news in the lead-up to his selection as Harris’s VP pick, dubbing Trump and his running mate Ohio Senator JD Vance as “weird,” something which appears to have gotten under Trump’s skin.
“No, he's weird. He is really weird. This guy, can you imagine I'm weird? It's just, you know, they do sound bites,” Trump said on Saturday.
Pivoting to one of his favorite subjects, immigration, Trump made the bizarre claim that “as border czar, Kamala Harris let in over 20 million, they're now saying the number could be 25 million illegal aliens from 168 different countries.”
“Most people don't even know that you have that many countries,” he added.
Trump made his oft-repeated claim that the people crossing the border are “coming from prisons and jails, insane asylums and mental institutions and terrorists at a level that we've never seen before.”
Trump’s numbers are heavily overestimated. Since the start of President Joe Biden’s time in office, Customs and Border Protection has recorded about 10 million migrant encounters across the country, but it should be noted that a migrant can be counted as an encounter on several occasions. Both independent and government analyses estimate that repeat encounters make up between a quarter and more than half of all encounters, The New York Times noted in June.
Meanwhile, border officials also estimate that about 1.7 million people avoided detention and have entered the US since fiscal year 2021, government data shows according to a Fox News Freedom of Information Act request.
