On Monday, July 6, 2026, Donald Trump reshared a video to Truth Social featuring kindergarteners at Gateway STEM Academy, a majority-Black K-8 charter school, wearing caps and gowns on stage while smiling and singing during their graduation. Under their blue graduation caps, most of the girls were wearing hijabs. The video was originally shared on X in June by the right-wing account End Wokeness, with the caption: “Public school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Every girl is in a hijab.. in kindergarten.” Trump, 80, reshared that post without additional comment.
What Happened in Trump’s Comment Section
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. These are five-year-olds. Their images are now permanently attached to a social media post that drew a torrent of anti-Muslim commentary from an audience of millions.
The post drew racist, xenophobic responses, with Trump’s comment section filling up with calls to deport the children and ban hijabs. One commenter responded “future terrorists.” Another wrote: “These children aren’t even cute to me.”
Independent journalist Aaron Rupar wrote: “Trump is now using his platform to attack kindergarteners because they are Muslim.” Others pointed out the contrast in silence: “Attacking literal kindergarteners but no thoughts on a group of white supremacists marching through D.C.,” referring to protests on the Fourth of July in Washington, D.C.
Gateway STEM Academy and the Community Behind the Clip
The clip came from Gateway STEM Academy, a majority-Black K-8 public charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota. It showed about 21 children in caps and gowns on stage singing a song together, with most of the girls wearing hijabs. Gateway serves one of St. Paul’s most diverse communities, home to many families in Minnesota’s large Somali diaspora, which includes one of the largest Somali populations of any city outside Africa.
The children in the video weren’t making a political statement. They were graduating kindergarten. The hijabs their daughters wore are a reflection of their faith and their families’ practice, the same faith practiced by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
Trump had posted the video of the kindergarten class celebrating their graduation without any context or caption to Truth Social on Monday morning, then reposted it, quoting another Truth Social user who had added a comment. The double-posting ensured maximum reach.
A Pattern, Not an Incident
Back in December 2025, Trump ended a Cabinet meeting by unleashing criticism on Somali immigrants, whom he described as “garbage,” saying he doesn’t want them in the United States. “We’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” he said. He applied the same description to Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali American who represents Minnesota. He said it four times in seven seconds.
Trump said “We don’t want ’em in our country” five times, referring to the nation’s 260,000 people of Somali descent. His assembled Cabinet members cheered and applauded.
Then came February. After Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib shouted at Trump during his State of the Union address to Congress, Trump posted on Truth Social calling them “Low IQ” and saying they “should be institutionalized,” describing them as “LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick.” He then wrote: “We should send them back from where they came, as fast as possible.” Omar immigrated to the United States from Somalia as a child refugee and became a U.S. citizen in 2000. Tlaib was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Palestinian immigrant parents. Both are duly elected members of the United States Congress.
The kindergarteners in St. Paul had done nothing remotely comparable to protest. They sang a song on a stage with their classmates and wore the clothes their faith calls for.
The Numbers Behind the Climate
The Council on American-Islamic Relations received 8,683 complaints nationwide in 2025, the highest number of single-year complaints CAIR has recorded since its first civil rights report was published in 1996. CAIR’s Minnesota chapter alone reported 693 complaints in 2025, a 96% increase over 2024, with 23% of its yearly total recorded in December alone. December, notably, is the same month Trump called Somali immigrants “garbage” at a nationally televised Cabinet meeting.
Anti-Muslim narratives more clearly resurfaced in 2025, particularly the notion that the religious principles followed by Muslims are inherently threatening and anti-American. That year also saw extreme proposals that would effectively ban the practice of the world’s second-largest religion in the U.S. or prevent its adherents from entering the country, including five bills at the federal level.
Government officials used collective and ideological punishment to target both non-citizens and citizens perceived as ethnically or ideologically undesirable. The CAIR report documents three Muslim-majority groups that were specifically targeted: Afghans, Somalis, and Syrians. The children at Gateway STEM Academy are part of that community.
The White House Response
The following day, the post was deleted from Trump’s page as a White House official told PEOPLE that “a White House staffer erroneously made the post.” Before the video was taken down, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt downplayed it, insisting the video was “from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King.” “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public,” she said.
The description of the video as a Lion King meme was false. The video showed real kindergarten children at a real school in St. Paul. Their faces were visible and unblurred. The graduation was genuine. The hijabs were real.
What It Means to Aim at Children
The video Trump shared showed children celebrating an academic milestone with their families. The caps and gowns were tiny. The smiles were unguarded. The decision to broadcast that video to tens of millions of followers, with a caption designed to provoke, and without any word of his own to frame it differently, was a deliberate choice.
CAIR-LA Executive Director Hussam Ayloush described the pattern directly: “Anti-Muslim hate in the mainstream has been driven, in part, by elected officials openly spreading the false and dangerous narrative that Islam and Muslims are incompatible with American values.”
Trump’s followers in the comment section did not arrive at their responses in a vacuum. The post pointed them at specific children. It told them, without saying so directly, that those children and their faith were something to scrutinize, to be alarmed by, to attack.
The Part That Doesn’t Go Away
A president sharing a video designed to mock five-year-olds for their religion would have been a political crisis in most of recent American history. In July 2026, it generated a news cycle, a false explanation from the press secretary, a deleted post, and then the next day’s headlines.
Minnesota’s 96 percent increase in civil rights complaints in 2025, with nearly a quarter of them concentrated in December alone, tells you something about how official rhetoric translates into everyday experience for Muslim families in that state. Those numbers will be updated again in 2026. The kindergarteners at Gateway STEM Academy will move on to first grade. Their parents, who sent them to school that day in their caps and gowns and hijabs, now know that the President of the United States thought their daughters’ graduation was worth pointing out as a problem.
What those children will make of all this, when they’re old enough to understand it, is a question nobody in the White House thought to consider before hitting repost.