Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump called his Democratic opponent Vice President Kamala Harris a 'defective person' in his public chat Friday with a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, the national nonprofit that has spearheaded efforts to get mentions of LGBTQ+ identity and structural racism out of K-12 classrooms.

He also sought to play down accusations that he was using a visit to Arlington National Cemetary with Gold Star families as a political prop.

"I stood with people over different graves and took pictures. I didn't want to take pictures, but I wanted to take them if they wanted to take them. They're very happy about that, as happy as they can be, because they'll never be happy," Trump said, insisting that the pictures he took were by request of the families. 

The Trump campaign posted a video that included Trump's trip to Arlington to his TikTok over the weekend.

The interview, held at the organization's annual meeting this year in Washington, D.C., gave Trump an opportunity to reach out to the most socially-conservative members of his base. It also showed Trump at his most comfortable, as he ambled from topic to topic multiple times between the prompts offered by Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice.

Though Justice sought to focus questions on social issues that her group holds dear, the conversation began by discussing immigration, the central pillar of Trump's campaign and his most prominent point of attack against Harris and President Joe Biden.

"Our country is being poisoned, poisoned, and your schools and your children are suffering greatly because they're going into the classrooms, they're taking disease and they don't even speak English. It's crazy," Trump said. "And we have our people that aren't going into a classroom. We have students that were there last year that aren't allowed into the school," he said, without providing examples.

Trump also attacked Harris's performance in her Thursday interview on CNN, done alongside running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, calling her "a defective person," adding that "we don't need another defective person as President of the United States, we just had that."

He did touch on socially conservative matters important to anti-LGBTQ activists, including the alleged participation of transgender athletes in the Olympics, in which he insisted that transgender women competed in boxing. (There is no evidence that either of two women who medaled in boxing at the center of the gender controversy, Algerian Imane Khelif or Taiwanese Lin Yu-ting, are transgender; both failed unspecified gender tests conducted by the International Boxing Association, which was previously disqualified from Olympic qualification. Khelif has since filed a cyberbullying complaint in France, the site of the games.)

The bulk of the group's 130,000-plus members are conservatives who agree with him that parents should have more say in public education and that racial equity programs and transgender accommodations don't belong in schools.

Yet Trump also will run the risk of alienating more moderate voters, many of whom see Moms for Liberty's activism as too extreme to be legitimized by a presidential nominee.

A year ago, Moms for Liberty was viewed by many as a rising power player in conservative politics that could be pivotal in supporting the Republican ticket. The group's membership had skyrocketed after its launch in 2021, fueled by parents protesting mandatory masking for students and remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But in the last several months, a series of embarrassing scandals and underwhelming performances during local elections have called Moms for Liberty's influence into question.

The group also has voiced support for Project 2025, a detailed and controversial playbook for the next conservative presidency from which Trump has repeatedly distanced himself.

Moms for Liberty serves on the advisory board for Project 2025, and the author of the document's education chapter taught a "strategy session" at the group's gathering Friday.

The negative perceptions about Moms for Liberty around the country could increase the potential liability for Trump, said University of Central Florida political science professor Aubrey Jewett.

"It certainly helps him rally his base," Jewett said. "But will that be enough to outdo the backlash?"

"President Trump believes students should be taught reading, writing and math in the classroom — not gender, sex and race like the Biden Administration is pushing on our public school system," said Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign's national press secretary.

The Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, has criticized Trump for his threats to dismantle the Department of Education. She also has spoken out against efforts to restrict classroom content related to race.

His campaign said Trump will use the rally to promise lower energy costs and criticize Harris, noting that, as a Democratic presidential primary candidate in 2019, she supported a ban on hydraulic fracturing. Harris' campaign now says she doesn't support a fracking ban. Trump did briefly touch on the subject, promising to send Harris a "MAGA hat, because she loves everything we're doing."

Both sides have campaigned heavily in Pennsylvania. Harris will be in Pittsburgh on Monday for Labor Day, making her first joint campaign appearance with President Joe Biden since he abandoned his reelection bid and endorsed her. Harris hasn't said much about her policy plans on tariffs and trade, but Biden has taken a page from the Trump playbook and proposed a tripling of tariffs on Chinese steel.