Donald Trump has claimed that when he was president he wanted to appoint his daughter, Ivanka, as America’s ambassador to the UN but she opted to instead to work on job creation and hired “millions of people”.

The Republican nominee for president in 2024 made the bizarre comments during a “fireside chat” on Friday night in Washington at the annual gathering of Moms for Liberty, a national nonprofit that has led efforts to get mentions of LGBTQ identity and structural racism out of classrooms.

In a long, zigzagging and at times incoherent conversation, Trump ricocheted between topics including his parents’ marriage, Scotland, his reality TV show The Apprentice, Elon Musk (“a super genius guy”), his debates against Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and his upcoming contest with rival Kamala Harris, whom he described as a “Marxist” and “defective person”.

At one point the 78-year-old reflected on the career of his daughter Ivanka, who was a senior adviser in the first Trump administration but has been largely absent from the campaign trail this time. She was “making so much money” from her fashion brand, he claimed, but then gave it up to join him in politics.

Trump recalled: “I said, you would be a great ambassador to the United Nations, United Nations secretary – there’d be nobody to compete with her. She may be my daughter but nobody could have competed with her, with her rat-rat-rat you know she’s got.

“She said, daddy, I don’t want to do that, I just want to help people get jobs. She would go around – not a glamorous job – but would go around to see Wal-Mart, to see Exxon, to see all these big companies to hire people and she had hired, like, millions of people during the course of her stay.”

The co-founder of Moms for Liberty, Tiffany Justice, sitting on stage with Trump, did not challenge his extraordinary suggestions that Ivanka had the requisite experience to serve at the UN or that she was responsible for hiring millions of people.

Justice did repeatedly press an anti-trans agenda. Trump argued that transgender women should not be allowed to play in women’s sports and said access to gender-affirming health care should be restricted. He repeated a false rightwing talking point that Olympic women’s boxing champion Imane Khelif is trans; Khelif was in fact assigned female at birth.

Trump went to make another wildly misleading claim: “But the transgender thing is incredible. Think of it. You kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child and you know many of these childs [sic] 15 years later say, what the hell happened? Who did this to me? They say, who did this to me? It’s incredible.”

He added that school boards have become “like dictatorships” hostile to the desires of parents, echoing conservative frustration that bubbled over in public meetings during the coronavirus pandemic. “I’m for parental rights all the way. I don’t even understand the concept of not being.”

Trump added: “The parents truly love the kids … You have to give the rights back to the parents.”

Often unprompted, Trump also kept circling back to his favourite topic: immigration. He said of migrants crossing the southern border illegally: “It’s crazy. Our country is being poisoned. And your schools and your children are suffering greatly because they’re going into the classrooms and taking disease, and they don’t even speak English.”

The Republican nominee went on to offer a lengthy and discursive defence of his recent visit to Arlington National Cemetery, which he has been criticised for turning into a campaign photo opportunity. Trump insisted that he was there at the invitation of the families of 13 US service members killed in Afghanistan and they asked to take pictures with him. A member of the audience shouted: “Thank you for respecting our veterans, Mr President!”

Trump repeatedly and bitterly criticised Biden and Harris for the Afghanistan withdrawal. “These people were killed by Biden, as far as I’m concerned,” he said, while also railing against “wokeness” in the military.

The conversation also gave Trump a rare platform to reminisce about his life and career. He told the audience that his mother Mary Anne MacLeod came from Scotland. “Do you know that some of the biggest, smartest, most brilliant leaders come from Scotland? Or at least, you know, their parents came from Scotland. Scotland did very well in this country.”

She came to the US, he continued, and met his father, Fred. “They fell in love. They got married and they were married for six and half decades. A long time. I said, Pop, I’m not going to be able to beat you.” Trump is now in his third marriage.

The former president had entered the hotel ballroom as he does at his signature rallies, standing and soaking up applause and chants of “Trump! Trump! Trump!” as Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA boomed from loudspeakers.

Trump was seeking to shore up support and enthusiasm among a major part of his base. The bulk of Moms for Liberty’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 do not belong in schools.

Yet Trump also runs the risk of alienating some moderate voters, many of whom see Moms for Liberty as extreme. In recent months a series of embarrassing scandals and disappointing performances during local elections have called Moms for Liberty’s influence into question.

The group also has voiced support for Project 2025, a radical blueprint for a Republican presidency from which Trump has repeatedly tried to distance 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.

Paula Steiner, a Republican activist from Vienna, Virginia, said in an interview that Trump is the one “standing in the way” of further attacks on parents’ rights. “Tim Walz and Kamala Harris will do everything they can to make America the most liberal country we’ve seen,” she added. “They will go beyond England [and] the other European countries.”