President Donald Trump posted a video of kindergartners celebrating their graduation to Truth Social on Monday morning, then came back with a repost that put the girls’ hijabs at the center of the message. The footage showed 21 children in caps and gowns singing on stage at Gateway STEM Academy in St. Paul, Minnesota.
What made the post travel so fast was not the graduation itself but the line Trump chose to amplify. The quote from End Wokeness read, “Public school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Every girl is in a hijab...in kindergarten,” turning a school celebration into a political flash point in a single repost. Negative comments followed, including one calling the children “future terrorists” and another saying, “These children aren’t even cute to me.”
Trump’s use of Truth Social fit a pattern he has already written in harsh terms. After the State of the Union, he called Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib “lunatics,” and he has also called Omar “low IQ” and accused her of complicity in a fraud scandal in Minneapolis. Omar represents Minnesota’s 5th district, which neighbors the district where Gateway STEM Academy is located, and she has long been one of Trump’s most frequent targets.
The friction in this post is hard to miss. The original video showed 21 kindergartners at a public charter school marking a milestone, yet the repost pushed the discussion toward the girls’ clothing and invited anti-Muslim responses around children who were barely old enough for school. Gateway STEM Academy is a majority-Black K-8 public charter school, and St. Paul has a large and diverse Muslim community, which gives the video a local setting that is very different from the reaction it sparked online.
The White House did not immediately answer a question from The Daily Beast about why Trump would want to amplify that kind of commentary. Gateway Academy also did not immediately respond to a request for comment, leaving the repost to stand on its own: a graduation clip turned into a national argument by the president’s own feed.
