Donald Trump Called Critical Race Theory Exactly What It Is, and He’s Backing It Up With Action

Watch the video above to hear Trump call out CRT directly in his own words.

Donald Trump didn’t mince words describing what’s been happening inside American classrooms for years. In a speech captured in the video above, Trump called Critical Race Theory “a Marxist doctrine holding that America is a wicked and racist nation,” warning that it was “being forced into our children’s schools, imposed into workplace trainings, and deployed to rip apart friends, neighbors, and families.”

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That description wasn’t hyperbole crafted for a campaign speech. It was an accurate diagnosis of exactly what’s been happening in public education for the better part of a decade, an ideological framework built to teach children that their country is fundamentally corrupt, dressed up in academic language and slipped into curriculum without most parents ever being asked whether they wanted it there.

Why did it take this long for a sitting president to say plainly what millions of parents already knew from watching their own kids come home from school?

He Didn’t Stop at Words

Trump backed up that diagnosis with real policy. He’s been explicit about the consequences schools should face for pushing this material onto children, saying flatly, “On Day 1, I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the shoulders of our children.”

That’s not an empty threat either. On March 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive order to begin dismantling the Department of Education entirely, calling it “a very historic action that was 45 years in the making.” Standing in front of a room that included school-age children seated at desks, Trump laid out the case in blunt terms. “We have to get our children educated,” he said. “We’re not doing well with the world of education in this country, and we haven’t for a long time.”

Here’s the sharp point worth sitting with. Trump didn’t just criticize the department’s ideological failures. He pointed straight at the actual numbers, noting that America spends more per pupil than almost any other country on earth and still ranks near the bottom of international education rankings. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and even China all outperform the United States despite spending a fraction of what American taxpayers pour into a bloated federal bureaucracy every single year.

The Department Was Never About Better Education

Trump’s argument cuts straight to the core problem with the Department of Education as it currently exists. It doesn’t teach a single child. It doesn’t run a single classroom. What it does is sit in Washington, distributing federal dollars with federal strings attached, strings that have increasingly meant funding tied to ideological compliance rather than actual academic outcomes.

Trump has made clear that critical programs like Pell Grants, Title I funding, and support for special needs students would be preserved and redistributed to other agencies rather than eliminated outright. This isn’t about abandoning vulnerable students. It’s about stripping away the layer of unelected federal bureaucrats who spent decades deciding which ideological frameworks get pushed into local classrooms, then handing that authority back to the states, communities, and parents who actually know their own children.

Isn’t that exactly where decisions about what gets taught to American children should have been sitting all along?

The Only Real Opposition Says Everything

Trump has pointed out something telling about who actually opposes eliminating the Department of Education. “The teachers’ unions are the only ones that are opposed to it,” he said. “No one else would want to hold us back.”

That’s worth sitting with. The same unions that have spent years pushing political agendas over classroom outcomes, the same institutions defending curriculum transparency lawsuits and running campaigns against school choice, are the loudest voices insisting a federal department with a documented track record of ideological overreach and mediocre academic results needs to stay exactly as it is.

Trump has framed this fight in the simplest terms possible. Return control of education to the states. Strip federal funding from schools pushing Critical Race Theory and gender ideology onto children. Stop treating a bloated Washington bureaucracy as sacred just because it’s existed for forty-five years. Watch the video above to hear him make that exact case, in his own words, standing in front of the very children this fight is actually about.