Hey, Ainsley Earhardt, didn’t your beloved Jesus tell you that lying is a sin?

Yesterday, I wrote about Donald Trump’s photo op of a visit to a Bronx barbershop. It turns out I missed something.

In the hour before the segment I wrote about yesterday, Fox & Friends aired another clip of the hosts' (presumably) favorite sexual predator at the barbershop. In that one, Trump was asked about improving schools in the Bronx. Trump obviously has no idea and he’ll probably outsource anything that is done, just like he’ll outsource the destruction of Obamacare, Medicare and Social Security.

In fact, Trump gave away his lack of interest in improving education at the end of his response, when he said, “What we’re gonna really do, though, is give you a lot of jobs and a great economy and you’re gonna be able to straighten yourself out.”

But first, he blathered. John Amato, at Crooks and Liars (where I am a contributor), caught the "demented response." Trump began by rambling about moving the Department of Education and reducing it to “one person and a secretary.” Then he said:

TRUMP: No transgender, no operations.

You know, they take your kid.

There are some places, your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl, okay? Without parental consent.

What is that all about?

That's like, that's, when they talk about a threat to democracy, they're a threat.

Could you imagine without parental consent? At first, when I was told that was actually happening, I said, you know, it's an exaggeration.

No, it happens.

It happens.

There are areas where it happens.

We're not going to let it happen.

The crowd looked nonplussed and unimpressed.

CNN fact checked a similar Trump lie last month, noting that Trump’s own campaign could not provide any validation:

There is no evidence that US schools have sent children into gender-affirming surgeries without their parents knowing or performed gender-affirming surgeries on site; Trump’s own presidential campaign could not provide a single example of this ever happening. Even in states where gender-affirming surgery is legal for people under age 18, parental consent is required before a minor can undergo such a procedure. 

But cohosts Lawrence Jones and Super Duper Christian Ainsley Earhardt insisted otherwise. Jones said, “The school doesn’t get to make the decision to transition them to another gender. And it’s happening, and those are authentic conversations.” With her dress hiked up almost to the top of her thigh, Earhardt agreed. “It is happening. It’s unbelievable, as a parent, that you would not be notified of such a major decision.”

Notice that neither cited a single example of it "happening."

Some schools allow students to socially transition without parental consent. But that is hardly, as Trump put it, “your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl.”

So either Jones and Earhardt were ignorantly spreading disinformation or, much more likely, were deliberately misrepresenting reality to conflate it with Trump’s lie and give it false credibility.

You can watch Earhardt and Jones prove they’ll say almost anything to help the felon win below, from the October 21, 2024 Fox & Friends. The first video shows Trump at the barbershop getting the question about education, then lying in his response, via Crooks and Liars.