At a rally in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina on Friday, August 21, 2026, Trump told supporters that “hospitals now are doing reverse surgery, at my order,” adding that nobody had heard about it.
No such presidential order exists. Trump named no hospital performing such procedures and did not explain what “reverse surgery” meant.
There is a real policy underneath the claim, which is what makes it worth recording precisely rather than dismissing. His Justice Department has extracted agreements from two major hospital systems, Texas Children's Hospital and the Cleveland Clinic, requiring them to establish or fund services for people who voluntarily seek to detransition. That is a documented action with a documented mechanism.
What Trump described at the rally was something else: hospitals surgically reversing procedures on his personal instruction. Detransition care is not a single operation performed on command, and a president cannot order hospitals to operate on anyone.