President Donald Trump is facing backlash after posting a video of children — including showing their unblurred faces — graduating from kindergarten, with some of the girls purportedly wearing hijabs.

“President Trump posted a captionless video of graduating kindergarteners on Truth Social on Monday, goading his supporters into verbally attacking little children simply for being Muslim,” The New Republic reported. “The clip is from Gateway STEM Academy, a majority-Black K-8 public charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota. It shows about 21 children in caps and gowns on stage singing a song together. Most of the girls are wearing hijabs.”

The original post of the video which Trump reposted reads: “Public school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Every girl is in a hijab … in kindergarten.”

Trump did not add any comments. TNR called the post “Islamophobic, weird, and creepy,” while noting that the comments section of Trump’s post was filled with calls “by racist, xenophobic MAGA supporters” to “deport the children and ban hijabs.”

TNR also noted that it “should come as no surprise that Trump isn’t above attacking children who just learned how to read, but this post is still particularly discomforting—and will certainly contribute to the already potent level of anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. and in Minnesota.”

Critics blasted Trump.

“There is something deeply unsettling about the president of the United States—the most powerful person in the world—going after kindergarten schoolchildren in Minnesota because they wore hijabs, as Trump has done this morning on his website,” The Bulwark’s Sam Stein wrote.

One social media commentator wrote, “Trump posted an unblurred video of more than a dozen Muslim kindergartners to Truth Social, exposing the children’s faces while targeting them for their religion.”

Another added, “Trump is a bigot. The president took to Truth Social to attack kindergarteners in hijabs. These are little kids. The president isn’t just a bigot, he’s also a coward.”

The original video was posted to the X social media platform in June.

U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) at the time commented, “If you are in a public school in America, you should be speaking english.”

Image via Reuters 

President Donald Trump’s apparent efforts to delay releasing the $5.8 million civil judgment to E. Jean Carroll are being met with a warning by the journalist’s legal team, who suggest there could be a legal maneuver for Trump to employ to forgo paying the judgment in either of the two cases he lost.

According to The Guardian, on July 4, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered Trump to release the $5.8 million judgment, which is in escrow, to Carroll by this coming Tuesday — or explain why he would not do so.

Carroll’s attorneys think Trump may be trying to buy time to mount another legal strategy, telling the judge that Trump’s request for an extension “appears to be little more than yet another play for time.”

“The case is separate from Trump’s appeal of a Manhattan civil jury’s 2024 award of $83.3m to Carroll for defamation,” The Guardian explains. “But her lawyers have suggested a legal scenario in which the president might seek to conjoin the cases and further delay payment of both.”

Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge) wrote, “We can only assume that defendant is seeking … to buy time so he can try to concoct some new basis to put off paying plaintiff presumably in connection with his forthcoming petition and motion for a rehearing.”

Trump’s former attorney, Justin Smith, in one of his final acts, wrote to the Supreme Court suggesting that his client would be appealing the $83.3 million civil judgment.

Smith argued that the Supreme Court “may wish to consider the petitions together,” given they involve the same parties.

The larger judgment case involves possible questions of presidential immunity, and that has Carroll’s attorneys concerned.

“A conjoined case, Carroll’s lawyers fear, could result in both judgments being wiped out,” The Guardian reports.

The president has also made clear he is no fan of Judge Kaplan, after the jurist made several rulings that “angered” Trump.

“What else can you expect from a Trump Hating, Clinton appointed judge, who went out of his way to make sure that the result was as negative as it could possible be,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in 2023, “speaking to, and in control of, a jury from an anti-Trump area which is probably the worst place in the US for me to get a fair ‘trial’.”

Image via Reuters

MS NOW spoke with a small but growing group of former Trump supporters who have left the MAGA movement. They reveal the depths of their experience and, in some cases, their lack of knowledge about basic events — like the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“I was as deep as anyone could have been,” Rich Logis, founder and CEO of Leaving MAGA, told MS NOW’s David Noriega. “I was an aspiring MAGA pundit. I had bylines in places like Fox and The Federalist. I spoke at Trump groups, I was a donor on the campaign. I was unapologetically a MAGA and Trump supporter.”

MS NOW says Leaving MAGA is “a nonprofit for those disillusioned by the movement.”

“I really wanted acceptance with my father, and my father was very much into Fox News, so that was something that we would connect on,” another Leaving MAGA member told MS NOW.

One said that she had become “heavily indoctrinated into trad wife culture.”

“We were all absolutely fine with household voting,” she said, declaring that Trump’s SAVE America Act bill “is to take that right [to vote] away from women.”

Another explained that she met her “husband in 2021, and they made me watch a documentary on January 6th, and I didn’t even know what happened on January 6th prior to the PBS documentary.”

“And I looked at him, and I said, ‘Scott, did that really happen?’ And he was like, ‘Where have you been?'”

Noriega says that Trump voters diversifying their news sources had a lot to do with their exit from MAGA.

“You know,” another explained, “I had believed that when Trump ran, that he would be somebody who would be different as an outsider. I think that he was correct in pointing out a lot of the flaws of our political system. It just turned out, unfortunately, that he didn’t try to solve those or remedy those ills, that he exacerbated them.”

One agreed when Noriega told them that, “Hearing you guys talk about MAGA and about supporting Trump, it sounds like you’re talking often about, like, a cult that’s damaged.”

“What MAGA does provide is a place where people feel seen and heard and validated,” one told MS NOW. “We used to say, ‘We’re not in the cult, the outside world is the cult, and we’re not the crazies, the outside world are the crazies.'”

Another explained that when he left MAGA, he “kicked the door open and jumped through.”

“I had a heart full of hate, so I would just go on the offensive and attack anybody and everybody that still supported it. And I learned over time that that’s not gonna change anybody. In fact, it’s gonna push people over. So I’ve learned to be that empathy, that voice of concern, the caring voice. ‘You can do this. I did it,'” he said.