Trump attacked Biden in another weird campaign rally rant

Donald Trump attacked Joe Biden for his student loan forgiveness program during an interesting and rather tame campaign speech at a rally in Wisconsin on June 18th. Trump said Biden’s new loan forgiveness was vile and a publicity stunt. 

In order to understand why Trump blasted Biden it’s important to know a little context behind his comments. Student loan forgiveness is a pivotal piece of policy Biden has been trying to implement since he beat Trump and took office. 

A timeline of Biden’s student loan forgiveness plans from Paradigm Advisors shows the President came into office in January 2021 promising to forgive student loan debt from public colleges and universities but has been hampered by politics. 

August 2022 saw the Biden administration announce that it would cancel $10,000 per borrower and $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients. The forgiveness was limited to $125,000 per person and $250,000 for married couples. But this was quickly challenged. 

In September, six states sued Biden and the Department of Education to halt their student loan forgiveness plan and one case eventually made it to the Supreme Court, which struck down the president’s plan according to the National Conference of State Legislators in June 2023. 

The Biden administration found other ways to forgive and cancel student loan debt via several different new programs. As of May 3rd, Forbes reported that upwards of $160 billion dollars in student loan debt had been forgiven by Biden over his three years in office. 

Biden’s $160 billion in loan forgiveness may not sound like much compared to the estimated $1.77 trillion in federal and private student loans Lending Tree reported Americans had in 2023, but Forbes noted Biden’s programs have forgiven about 10% of all outstanding student debt. 

The President’s student loan forgiveness policies are very popular, polling from Bankrate found that 18% of Americans say that student debt will have a major influence on who they vote for in November, according to The Hill. 

The number of Americans surveyed by Bankrate who said that the student debt issue would affect how they vote in November rose to 29% among those with outstanding loans, so clearly the issue should be significant for both parties. 

The importance of student debt to a group of voters core to Biden’s future success in the 2024 election may be why the President has beat the drum of student loan forgiveness so loudly and may be why Trump went after Biden’s policies so viciously while speaking in Racine, Wisconsin. 

The former president called Biden’s student loan forgiveness policies “vile” and told his crowd of supporters that Biden’s new programs would be rebuked even harder than his original scheme to help some of the country’s most indebted individuals. 

Trump compared student loan relief to “illegal amnesty” for immigrants who married American citizens in what The Independent called a rambling speech before he dove into his assault on Biden for working so hard to forgive student loan debt.  

“He did that with the tuition and that didn’t work out too well, he got rebuked, and then he did it again, it’s going to get rebuked again, even more so, it’s an even more vile attack, but he did that with tuition just to get publicity with the election,” Trump said.

The former president went on to say that Biden was only pursuing student loan forgiveness for the publicity and said his presumptive 2024 presidential rival didn't care about student loan forgiveness, but rather he only wanted to get it done before the election—insinuating he was only doing it for the political gains he would get. 

Trump then transitioned to talking about all of his stuff, referencing his legal issues and calling it “third-world country stuff.” However, the former president wasn’t done with Biden. The Independent reported that Trump turned back to Biden’s student loan forgiveness plans twenty minutes later. 

“He’s throwing money out the window,” Trump said. “This student loan program, which is not even legal, it’s not even legal, and the students aren’t buying it, by the way. His polls are down. I’m leading in young people by numbers that nobody has ever seen.”

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