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.
The organization with Florida origins contested schools’ COVID-19 precautions before evolving to focus more squarely on what it’s characterized as “woke” indoctrination in public schools; advocating for the removal of books from classrooms and school libraries, many about people of color and LGBTQ+ characters and themes; opposing policies that allow transgender and nonbinary students to play sports and use bathrooms that align with their gender identity; and supporting restrictions on instruction about race and gender.
In the 2022 midterms, around half of the 270 Moms for Liberty-endorsed school board candidates won their elections, and the organization’s leaders told Education Week they would commit to raising more money and campaigning for candidates on a national scale.
But the group has more recently inspired blowback, with liberals mobilizing to defeat Moms for Liberty candidates in contested school board elections.
Just this week, on Tuesday, Aug. 20, Florida school board candidates aligned with Moms for Liberty and DeSantis lost many—but not all—of the races in which the group had decided to endorse, according to the Associated Press and Politico.
The organization has exercised some influence recently by joining one of the several conservative lawsuits challenging the Biden administration’s new Title IX regulation, which explicitly prohibits discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation under the nation’s landmark law banning sex discrimination.
A judge in July temporarily blocked the Title IX revision from taking effect in every school attended by children of Moms for Liberty members, amounting to at least one in nearly every state. Moms for Liberty has attempted to recruit more members so the rule will be stopped at more U.S. schools.
