Donald Trump makes weird and inappropriate comments to children at White House event

Donald Trump made a string of massively inappropriate comments in front of a group of children. He went on at length about deaths in Iran, terror killings in Iran, "transgender mutilisation of children" and repeated false claims about the 2020 election being "rigged" during an Oval Office event with schoolchildren, marking the return of the Presidential Fitness Test. And later, on the White House lawn, he gathered a larger group of school athletes together to teach them his weird YMCA dance. He repeatedly brought up spurious and highly politically charged claims about transgender people, including a direct conversation with a boy who is training to be a weightlifter. "You'll never compete against women in powerlifting," Trump said, before launching into a frequently trotted out, and largely inaccurate, claim about a trans weightlifter breaking a record that had "stood for 18 years." He also asked the boy: "Do you think you can take me in a fight?" After a string of speeches from RFK Jr, "Secretary of War" Pete Hegseth and Wrestling boss-turned Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Trump took questions from reporters. On Iran, Trump said: "We can't let Iran have a nuclear weapon. You might be too young for this. They probably know better than most people. But you can't let a bunch of lunatics have a nuclear weapon. So we just hit records on the Dow." Asked about the idea of arming Iranians to overthrow the regime, Trump said: "You can have 200,000 people protesting and have five or six sick people with guns, and when they start shooting them right between the eyes and you see a guy fall and another one fall and you have no guns, very few people would be able to stand there and do it. Don't forget, they killed 42,000 people last month. 42,000 unarmed protesters who had no guns, so they had a 250,000 people crowd and they had snipers...and you're standing there and all of a sudden a guy on your left goes down ...that's what happened with a woman protest. All of a sudden a woman dropped dead with a bullet right there." He pointed to his forehead: "Always right there." At one point Trump looked around while discussing the people who run missile defence operations on US aircraft carriers and made a weird vocalisation with his tongue. "They say 'missile coming, missile coming'," he said, before letting out a theatrical sigh and fake typing on the desk in front of him, adding: "it's almost blablablablabla." Asking each of the children around him what sport they played, he finally asked a boy to his right, who said he played football, but wanted to pursue powerlifting next year. "They had a man powerlifter and they decided to go the other way, they had a record that stood for 18 years - he beat it by 119 lbs," Trump said to the budding weightlifter. The incident he's referring to is a Canadian powerlifter, Anne Andres, who set two records at the Canadian Powerlifting Union's 2023 Western Canadian Championship. The records, for women between 40 and 50 without supportive equipment, had not stood for 18 years, nor was the margin in either of them 119 lbs. Andres transitioned more than two decades ago, and only started powerlifting seven years prior to breaking the records. In summer 2024, the Canadian Powerlifting Union issued Andres a six-month suspension after a panel found Andres had engaged in harassment, threats, and abuse directed at female competitors and sports officials, including Ontario powerlifter April Hutchinson and the Alberta Powerlifting Union. The official records that Andres broke have reverted to the previous holder on the organisation's website, but it's unclear what prompted the change.