Trump Will Return to Moms for Liberty Summit as Keynote Speaker
Former President Donald Trump next week will speak at the third annual summit of a group that rose to national prominence leveraging parent frustrations with schools’ COVID-19 safety precautions into success flipping school boards in much of the country to conservative control.
Moms for Liberty announced Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, as the keynote speaker at its Joyful Warriors summit on Friday, Aug. 30 in Washington.
Trump will join other speakers, including former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who served in the House of Representatives and ran for president in 2020 as a Democrat before becoming a Trump supporter, and Glenn Beck, a conservative political commentator and CEO of Blaze Media.
The speech will be Trump’s second appearance at the organization’s national summit. Last year, he spoke at the group’s gathering in Philadelphia, where he said he would eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and make school principals an elected position. He also called public schools “leftist-dominated systems.”
In a sign of the group’s sway among Republicans and how it had made education issues more prominent in the presidential race, Trump appeared at the Moms for Liberty summit along with a number of his then-rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
This year, Trump has said little about his education priorities on the campaign trail, but the Republican Party platform he endorsed calls for universal school choice, merit pay for teachers, and the end of teacher tenure. It also includes a nod to the version of parents’ rights championed by Moms for Liberty.
Moms for Liberty has worked to expand its political influence since the pandemic by endorsing, funding, and campaigning for conservative school board candidates across the country.