Fact Check: Trump’s Nonexistent Post on Education Department
Claim
A post on the social media platform Threads purportedly shows a post from former President Donald Trump on Truth Social, claiming that the Department of Education is a "terrible organization" that wastes taxpayer money on a "hybrid of the fork and spoon" and peanut bans.
Fact
The post is a fabrication. It does not appear on Trump’s Truth Social account, and there are no credible news reports that he made such a post.
Trump’s Criticisms of the Department of Education
Trump has repeatedly promised to close the federal Department of Education, although doing so would require congressional legislation. He has reportedly considered taking executive action to dismantle the agency. However, there is no evidence that he has posted anything about the department spending taxpayer money on a "hybrid of the fork and spoon" and enforcing peanut bans.
There is no such post on Trump’s Truth Social account, nor does anything similar appear in an archive of his posts. Similarly, there is no such post on Trump’s X account, nor are there any credible news reports about the purported statement.
Trump has continued to talk about eliminating the agency, saying in early February that his nominee to lead the department, Linda McMahon, should eventually "put herself out of a job."
History of the Department of Education
The modern Department of Education was created on October 17, 1979, by then-President Jimmy Carter. He said that the federal government had "for too long failed to play its own supporting role in education as effectively as it could."
However, it was not the first time the country had a federal Department of Education. In 1867, President Andrew Johnson signed a bill that created the country’s first Department of Education, but it was demoted to an office in the Department of the Interior about a year later due to concerns about its potential control over local schools.
Origin of the Spork
The spork, a combination of a spoon and fork, was invented by a Rhode Island doctor named Samuel Francis, who filed a patent in 1874 for a utensil that featured a spoon with prongs on the front and a blade on one side. The term "spork" was not trademarked until 1970, but it had appeared in a dictionary decades earlier.
Conclusion
The post claiming that Trump posted about the Department of Education’s supposed waste on a "hybrid of the fork and spoon" and peanut bans is a fabrication. There is no evidence that Trump made such a post, and it does not appear on his Truth Social account or in any credible news reports.