Trump and Ivanka push to reopen schools, Angry Internet demands they send own kids to 'public school first'
After Donald and Ivanka Trump both said that they would ideally want the schools to reopen in the fall, people on social media started questioning if the POTUS and the first daughter were ready to send their own kids to school amid the ongoing health crisis. Both President Trump and his daughter, who is also his senior adviser, joined Education Secretary Betsy DeVos this week for a “National Dialogue on Safely Reopening America’s Schools” event at the White House, where the father-daughter duo pushed for states to reopen schools this fall after many of them closed this spring amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“We want to reopen the schools. Everybody wants it. The moms want it, the dads want it, the kids want it. It’s time to do it,” Trump said at a White House event despite cases surging to more than 3 million around the United States and the death count rising to more than 131,000. “We’re very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools.”
Although Trump did not elaborate on specifics on how he would pressure governors on the issue, he later tweeted that reluctance to reopen schools was a political issue. "Corrupt Joe Biden and the Democrats don’t want to open schools in the Fall for political reasons, not for health reasons! They think it will help them in November. Wrong, the people get it!" he wrote.
As her father threatened to cut off billions of dollars in federal funding - most of which was allocated to low-income schools - if states did not agree to reopen schools, the first daughter weighed in with a special appeal regarding the concerns of single, working mothers. “Single mothers will disproportionately bear the burden of school closures in the form of lower pay, less job security, and general overwhelm in part because work in jobs without the option of telecommuting. We must prioritize safely reopening America’s schools,” she tweeted.
Given that she was a multimillionaire daughter of a president who has been widely criticized for his poor handling of the pandemic, her appeal rang hollow in the ears of Twitter users. Both she and her father were also mocked for voicing their opinion on public school-going children as they both send their kids to private institutions, which have the facility of providing tutors who to home school students if necessary.
"Send your kids to public schools first and go for it!" conservative Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin tweeted as a response to Ivanka 's tweet.
One of the top trending names on Twitter on Wednesday was Barron with a number of people asking whether the president and First Lady Melania Trump would send their son back to school. Although he presently attends a private school in Maryland, author and scholar Reza Aslan asked: "Is Barron starting DC public school in the fall?"
“We should all watch very closely to see if Trump sends Barron back to school, or if any of the GOP send their kids to a public school in the fall. Spoiler, they wont!,” another Twitter user wrote. Writer Amee Vanderpool said it wasn’t likely that St. Andrew’s - the school that Barron attends - would reopen anytime soon although it has received government loan under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which is designed to help small businesses stay afloat.