Trump insists on false claims about gender-affirming health care that his own campaign team cannot substantiate

Donald Trump made a crazy, evidence-based claim about gender-affirming child care during a campaign rally on Saturday.

“Can you imagine you're a father and your son leaves the house and you say, 'Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a great day at school,' and your son comes back from a brutal surgery,” Trump told the crowd in Mosinee, Wisconsin.

“Can you even imagine this? What the hell is going on with our country?”

This false claim comes just over a week after the former president made similar anti-transgender hate remarks at an event hosted by the far-right group Moms for Liberty, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled an “anti-government extremist group.”

“The transgender thing is unbelievable. Think about it. Your child goes to school and comes home a few days later with surgery. The school decides what to do with your child,” Trump told Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice.

Trump's previous claim is also false, as there is no evidence that schools in the U.S. send children for gender reassignment surgeries or perform them on school grounds – or that these surgeries take place without parental consent, as CNN noted.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, gender reassignment surgery can also be life-saving, while surgeries such as genital surgeries and mastectomies are rarely performed on minors.

CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale took to social media to criticize Trump for his “lie,” adding that the Republican candidate's campaign “could not find a single example of this 'a school secretly sending a child to have gender reassignment surgery without parental consent' thing ever happening anywhere in America.”

Justice told CNN last week that while the children were “not being operated on at school,” she was “grateful” to Trump for making the false claim at the Moms for Liberty event.

Critics on social media did not hold back in their comments about Trump, with some pointing to the number of injuries and deaths due to gun violence in schools.

The former president's comments came just days after two students and two teachers were killed in a shooting at Apalachee High School in the US state of Georgia.