The flood of illegal migrants into America's Democrat-run cities is overwhelming us and forcing Americans to suffer, causing kids' education quality to decline and leaving homeless veterans in the streets while illegals get put up in luxury hotels, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump lamented Friday night.
"We have the dumbest people in history running our country," Trump told Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice at the 2024 Moms for Liberty National Summit in Washington D.C., on Friday night, which aired live and in its entirety on the free Newsmax2 streaming platform.
"We have our veterans sleeping on the streets and we have illegal immigrants coming into our country living in luxury hotels about where the veterans are. It's so reverse of what it should be."
The migrant crisis is impacting American public schools, too, as they are forced to take in migrant children en masse, downgrading the educational opportunities of our American children, Trump warned.
"What's happening to you our country. Our country is being poisoned. And your schools and your children are suffering greatly because they're going into the classrooms and taking disease, and they don't even speak English.
"It's crazy."
Trump spoke about the reports of American school students displaced from their schools because of a migrant student rush, a story that has been told in some Democrat-controlled states like Massachusetts.
"We have our people that aren't going into a classroom. We have students that were there last year, they're not allowed into the school this year," Trump said. "They're not allowed. It's crazy."
Trump has updated his estimated number of illegal migrants that have flooded into the U.S. under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris' open borders policies. Day 1 executive orders restored "catch and release" and allowed illegal migrants entering the country to promise to return to a court hearing they often never show up for, border experts have told Newsmax.
"No city can take in" migrants on the level the Biden-Harris administration has forced America to do, Trump said. "When you think 21 million people came into our country — that's bigger than New York — 21 million people came into our country.
"No country can take that. Nobody can withstand that. It's going to bring us down."
It all comes down to the danger of giving Harris another four years of foisting this on the American people, but hopefully the 2024 presidential cycle can expose her as being ill-equipped and wrong for America, Trump concluded.
"Now everyone's watching and now we see she's defective," Trump said after her sit-down interview with CNN.
"We don't need another defective person as president of the United States."
The fireside chat lasted approximately an hour, delving deeply into the downgrade of American education in Democrat-run cities and states.
Trump said Democrat-run school boards have become "like dictatorships" hostile to the desires of parents, echoing conservative frustration that bubbled over in public meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"I'm for parental rights all the way," Trump said. "I don't even understand the concept of not being."
Trump entered a hotel ballroom in Washington as he does at his signature rallies, standing and soaking up applause for the entirety of Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA," followed by chants of "Trump, Trump, Trump."
The former president sought to shore up support and enthusiasm among a major part of his base. The bulk of Moms for Liberty's 130,000-plus members are conservatives who agree with him that parents should have more say in public education and that racial equity programs and transgender accommodations do not belong in schools.
A year ago, Moms for Liberty was viewed by many as a rising power player in conservative politics that could be pivotal in supporting the Republican ticket. The group's membership skyrocketed after its launch in 2021, fueled by parents protesting mandatory masking for students and remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump's education proposals include promoting school choice, giving parents more say in education, awarding funding preference to states and school districts that abolish teacher tenure, financially rewarding good teachers, and allowing parents to directly elect school principals.
He also has called for terminating the Department of Education, barring transgender athletes from playing in girls' sports, and cutting funding from any schools pushing "inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content" and from schools with vaccine mandates.
The event took on a party-like atmosphere as the group awaited Trump's arrival to a hotel ballroom in Washington. Donning shirts with messages like "Moms for Trump" and "We don't co-parent with the government," attendees at the group’s annual gathering ate buffet desserts, drank beer, and cheered to a cover band playing country hits.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.