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By Jesse Hagopian
This article was originally published by Truthout
Trump’s lesson to children was to fear difference, obey power, and treat vulnerable people as threats.
Seated behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office in early May, Donald Trump delivered a disturbing lecture to a group of children huddled around him — most of them not yet even teenagers. They had been brought to the White House for what was supposed to be a celebratory event marking the reinstatement of the Presidential Fitness Test, dressed in brightly colored T-shirts bearing the government emblem of the rebooted program.
Flanked by a group including cabinet secretaries Linda McMahon, Pete Hegseth, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump turned the White House into his schoolhouse. Casting himself as a master teacher, he launched into an improvised lesson — part contemporary issues, part history, part geography, and all MAGA mythology.
During his lesson, Trump exposed a central contradiction at the heart of his politics. States and school districts across the country have enacted MAGA education policies — such as the Florida Stop WOKE Act — that prohibit teaching content that might cause students “guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress.” But Trump himself showed no such restraint. During what amounted to an advanced course in authoritarian education, he immersed children in a grotesque curriculum of graphic executions, nuclear annihilation, and the threat of entire societies being wiped out — paired with nationalist triumphalism and the scapegoating of transgender people.
The premise of the event itself rested on the fear that the U.S. has become weak and soft, which could only be remedied by making the country aggressively masculine again. Trump framed the return of the Presidential Fitness Test not merely as a health initiative, but as part of a broader struggle for national strength and power. Warning in a statement to the press that declining youth fitness weakens “our economy, military readiness, academic performance, and national morale,” he cast physical toughness as a prerequisite for a nation prepared for war.
This is not education. It is spectacle, coercion, indoctrination, and the normalization of violence.
Teaching Fear
In one of the most disturbing moments of the event, a reporter asked Trump whether Iranian protesters, with U.S. support, could topple their government. He answered by explaining, in vivid detail, how those protesters might be massacred: “You can have 200,000 people protesting … and when they start shooting them right between the eyes, and you see a guy fall, and another one fall…”
Then Trump raised his hand to his face, pressing his index finger between his brows, marking the place where the bullet would strike. Recalling protests led by Iranian women, he described a demonstrator being shot by snipers as “a woman dropped dead with a bullet right there,” repeatedly pointing between his eyes to show where the bullet struck. He described the panic that could spread through the crowd as “another woman dropped” and protesters began to flee. A boy to his right pursed his lips as Trump narrated the murders. A girl to his left appeared visibly jarred — her eyes widened, her expression tense — as the adults around her stood by silently.
Educators and child psychologists have long warned that exposing children to graphic violence without context or emotional grounding can create anxiety, confusion, and fear. The National Association of School Psychologists advises adults discussing violence with children to keep explanations “developmentally appropriate” and avoid exposing them to “vengeful, hateful, and angry comments.” Trump did the opposite. Rather than helping children process violence with care and understanding, he used graphic imagery to normalize brutality and reinforce the logic of power.
Trump did not stop at describing executions. He escalated from scenes of political murder to warnings of nuclear catastrophe.
He did briefly acknowledge the inappropriateness of his comments, saying, “You might be too young for this,” before warning the children that “you can’t let a bunch of lunatics have a nuclear weapon or the world will be in a lot of trouble.” As Desi Lydic quipped on “The Daily Show”: “No, they’re not too young. I’m sure they’ve already seen the ‘Paw Patrol’ episode where they drop a ballistic missile on Humdinger.”
Organizations focused on child development emphasize that young people need guidance and context when confronting frightening world events. Child advocacy organization Defending the Early Years (DEY) notes that young children “hear headlines and snippets of conversations and are often left to make sense of confusing situations without proper guidance or facilitation.” Rather than ignoring difficult events — or exposing children only to the most disturbing fragments — DEY emphasizes the need for “age-appropriate conversations … so they can understand what is happening.”
A responsible lesson on nuclear weapons, for example, might begin by asking students what they already know and what questions they have. It might include a brief, factual explanation of what nuclear weapons are, paired with age-appropriate historical context — such as the global movements that have worked to limit or eliminate them. Students might examine how ordinary people have organized against nuclear war, or consider what actions communities can take to reduce the risk of these weapons being used.
Rather than helping children process difficult realities, Trump took it even further: “Iran with a nuclear weapon … maybe we wouldn’t all be here right now.”
He amplified the dread by asking the kids to imagine a world in which entire regions are destroyed, and where they themselves would not survive: “I can tell you, the Middle East would have been gone. Israel would have been gone. They would have trained their sights on Europe, first, and then us.”
Counselor Nathaniel N. Ivers notes that fear of nuclear devastation can have a lifelong impact on children. During the Cold War, studies found that children and caregivers often experienced heightened anxiety about nuclear threats — and that when adults expressed more fear, their children tended to become more anxious as well.
Beyond inflicting psychological trauma, Trump’s discussion of nuclear apocalypse also lacked the historical context students would need to understand how the past shapes present conflicts. The United States remains the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons in war — dropping atomic bombs on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, killing more than 200,000 civilians. Trump, of course, was not interested in allowing students to consider why many around the world fear the U.S. use of nuclear weapons more than any other country.
Nor did Trump mention the long history of U.S. intervention in Iran itself. As historian Stephen Kinzer explains, after World War II, the people of Iran rose up to achieve a brief period of democracy and “They did something that the United States never likes: They chose a leader who wanted to put the interests of his own country ahead of the interests of the United States.” The leader they elected was Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who moved to nationalize the country’s oil industry. In response, the United States and Britain orchestrated the 1953 coup that overthrew him. As Kinzer put it, “this was not just an attack on one person, but an attack on democracy.”
But Trump didn’t teach these truths that could help children understand how those in power have misused it. And just as Trump taught children to fear “enemies” abroad, he also taught them to view transgender people at home as threats to the social order he was trying to defend. Railing against gender-affirming care for trans youth, Trump invoked “transgender mutilization” — mangling the word he was trying to weaponize — in an apparent attempt to frighten the children before abruptly catching himself and saying, “Don’t listen to this, kids.” Then, reversing his decision to have the children disregard him, Trump looked into the eyes of the youth and declared, “I’ve never had one person say it’s important we allow women to be challenged by men in women’s sports…”
Moments later, he resumed the lesson. Turning to one of the boys beside him and slapping him on the arm, Trump said, “I don’t think we are gonna have to worry about you.” He then asked, “Are you a strong person?” When the boy replied yes, Trump followed up: “Do you think you can take me in a fight?”
Again, aggression was the lesson.
Trump’s performance of masculine bravado and attacks on transgender athletes were not separate from his broader message — they were central to it. Trump has presented the revival of the Presidential Fitness Test not simply as a health initiative, but as part of rebuilding a “tougher,” more militaristic national character. Within that worldview, rigid masculinity becomes a political ideal associated with aggression, control, and toughness, while vulnerability, peace, or gender nonconformity are treated as signs of weakness and decay.
Trump’s rhetoric drew on a long bipartisan tradition in U.S. politics in which organized sports and physical fitness were treated not as recreation, but as training grounds for masculine discipline, war, and imperial power. Theodore Roosevelt’s celebration of “The Strenuous Life” warned against national “softness” and argued that athletics cultivated the “virile virtues” needed by a colonizing nation. As sports historian Dave Zirin wrote in A People’s History of Sports in the United States, Roosevelt saw “masculinity and Muscular Christianity as symbiotic with a nation poised to conquer.”
Decades later, Democratic President John F. Kennedy echoed similar fears in his essay “The Soft American,” arguing that the U.S.’s “struggles against aggressors throughout our history have been won on the playgrounds and corner lots and fields of America,” and that military victories “only come from bodies which have been conditioned by a lifetime of participation in sports.” Kennedy’s expansion of the Presidential Fitness program, established under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, was explicitly tied to Cold War anxieties about national decline, military readiness, and the U.S.’s ability to compete with global rivals. Trump’s revival of the Presidential Fitness Test tapped directly into that tradition — one that links fears of national decline to nationalism, militarism, and rigid ideas about masculinity.
“Everyone Is Welcome Here” vs. MAGA Hypocrisy
Taken together, Trump’s lesson was about teaching children who and what to fear — foreign enemies overseas and vulnerable communities at home — while deflecting from the real dangers of war, bigotry, and oppression. As Rethinking Schools argues, education should help students “see injustice, imagine possible remedies, and develop the tools to enact them.” Trump’s lesson taught the opposite: fear difference, obey power, and treat vulnerable people as threats.
For years, Trump and his allies — especially writer Christopher Rufo — have argued that schools should avoid teaching material that is “divisive,” “negative,” or emotionally distressing. Trump and his allies have described lessons on racism and slavery as “toxic,” even likening such teaching to “child abuse.”
The hypocrisy is rank.
In Idaho, middle school teacher Sarah Inama was ordered in January 2025 to take down a classroom poster that read, “Everyone is welcome here.” That demand was the result of Idaho’s 2021 “divisive concepts” law, which restricts how teachers can discuss race, identity, and inequality in schools. In that environment, a message affirming the lives of all children was recast as subversive indoctrination meant to sow division. Across the country, teachers have been reprimanded for displaying Pride flags, forced out of their jobs for acknowledging systemic racism, or warned against teaching that slavery was wrong, for fear that it might make students uncomfortable.
But describing people being shot “right between the eyes” is comforting? Imagining nuclear annihilation prevents psychological distress? Celebrating bombing campaigns is reassuring?
In this upside-down moral universe, empathy is dangerous, human dignity is controversial, and truth itself is suspect. What is condemned is not harm, but the effort to understand and end it.
And yet, there is resistance.
At first when Sarah Inama was told to take down her classroom poster, she complied. But after a student asked if taking it down meant that not all students were welcome, the meaning of the order became undeniable — and she put the poster back up.
After rehanging it, she wrote to her principal that the request “goes against everything that we work towards and the type of community that we dream to have at our school.”
“We (help students learn) by making them feel safe,” she continued. “We do that by making sure they have food. We do that by building relationships with them. And, most importantly, we do that by making sure that they know that they are all welcome there and we want them here … With that being said, I have put my sign back up.”
In putting the sign back up in her classroom, Inama posed a challenge to us all: Will we insist that students deserve classrooms that tell the truth, nurture their humanity, and equip them to challenge injustice — or will we allow fear and violence to become the curriculum?
This article was originally published by Truthout and is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Please maintain all links and credits in accordance with our republishing guidelines.
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