President Biden repeated a lie that he was the first person in his family to attend college – more than three decades after he first admitted it wasn’t true.
The oldest president ever repeated this false claim while touting his efforts to bail out student loan borrowers during a stop Monday at a college in swing state Wisconsin.
“Like many people in this audience, I was the first in my family to go to college and watched my father struggle to get there,” he said.
Biden, 81, has already been called out several times for making the same claim.
He admitted it was false more than 35 years ago, when his 1987 presidential campaign ended in a plagiarism scandal that saw him retract comments from a British politician.
Confronted at the time with plagiarism and a number of inaccurate statements, Biden recognized at the New York Times in 1987, “there are Finnegans, my mother’s family, who went to university.”
Biden’s father also attended the prestigious Johns Hopkins University for a year, the York Daily Record reported in 2020, citing census records. A 1941 marriage announcement in the Scranton Tribune noted that the president’s father “attended Johns Hopkins University.”
Biden also spoke lovingly of his maternal grandfather, Ambrose Joseph Finnegan, calling him an “American football player” from Santa Clara College in California. in a 2022 speech.
An obituary of his grandfather also acknowledges that he enrolled at Santa Clara College after graduating from high school in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
“A star athlete, he gained national recognition for his exploits as quarterback of the Santa Clara football team,” It said.
The obituary goes on to say that Finnegan graduated from college and took a job in the real estate industry.
Even so, Biden has repeatedly made the same claim that he was the first in his family to go to college, including during a CNN town hall while he was running for president in 2020, according to the Washington Times. “Biden resurrected an old lie,” The Trump campaign wrote at the time.
Republicans were quick to point out the inconsistencies after Biden made his remarks in Wisconsin on Monday, with Greg Price, communications director for the State Freedom Caucus Network, blasting the president at X for lying.
Tim Murtaugh, Washington Times columnist, also wrote that “It is unfortunate to point out that Biden cannot be the first in his family to attend college, while also having a grandfather who played college football.”
In a statement to the Post, a White House spokesperson said the president “is proud to be the first Biden to earn a college degree.”
