Donald Trump Sics his Children on Public Education

Ivanka Trump with Eva "I'm not a Republican" Moskowitz

President Donald Trump's arrival on January 20 brings with it, among other toxins, an unprecedented threat to middle-class workers across the nation. For one, Trump supports a national right-to-work law, meant to strip unions of funding and give them less political clout than a Cub Scout. Even if an anti-worker bill somehow dies in a Republican-controlled congress, Trump's appointee to the Supreme Court will take care of those cases meant to crown corporatists and crush unions. They're coming for your pension and there's nothing you can do about it.    

Topping the target are public school teachers, whose union was an early and adamant endorser of Hillary Clinton. Like his Queens cousin Governor Andy Cuomo, Trump traces the ills of the inner cities to the infamous and elusive "education bureaucracy", otherwise known as the people who dedicate their lives to children (see public school teachers). While what Trump utters about education has about as much nuance as an orangutan's ass, Trump's trust fund children are primed for a pet project, and both Ivanka and Don Jr. have demonstrated a desire to drive our schools into a ditch.

Take Don Jr.'s recent ramblings at the Republican National Convention, for instance, where he compared schools to department stores that somehow only benefit adults:

Our schools used to be an elevator to the middle class. Now they are stalled on the ground floor. They're like Soviet-era department stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers, for the teachers and the administrators and not the students.                                                                                                                    -Donald Trump Jr.

Tortured metaphors aside, everyone knows that students must take the stairs in order to truly benefit from public education, as we get back only what we put in.  

On the other hand, Don Jr.'s been riding his daddy's gold-plated elevators since birth, which he believes justifies the sanctimony he spews at schools, and can claim the moral high ground only because he lives in a taller building than the rest of us. 

When she's not entertaining the Japanese prime minister, Don Jr.'s little sister Ivanka is visiting with the likes of Eva Moskowitz, the New York City charter school profiteer who'd like to go national. Though Moskowitz refused to become Trump's Secretary of Education because she's a Democrat, after all, Trump's plans to privatize education evidently have nothing to do with party affiliation so Eva's all-in. Nevermind that Moskowitz's schools would make a segregationist blush and treat teachers and kids like cogs in the college and career machine. It seems Ivanka saw into Eva's soul during their first meeting at Trump Tower and vowed to wield all the power of her gold throne to undermine public schools.

And it's precisely the prospect of Donald Trump's unelected offspring pulling the strings on issues like education while simultaneously building his business which threatens the Republic.

How long, for instance, before the grand opening of Trump Charter School, or the grand re-opening of Trump University, fully-funded by the feds? It's probably sooner than we think.  If anything, Eva Moskowitz will make a lot of money in the next few years.

Those voters hopeful that Trump would "get rid of Common Core" and "restore local control" should realize that Donald Trump knows as much about education as, yes, an orangutan's ass. What Trump does know however is that there's money to be made, and public education seems a safer bet than his casinos. Trump has therefore summoned his kids, northeastern neoliberal asstards in search of something bigger than themselves.

The oligarchs have landed and it won't be pretty, for public education or anything else. It will be up to the enlightened to push truth in a post-truth world, to denounce and destroy the graft and greed. The whole world is waiting and watching.