Joe Biden repeated a previously debunked lie about being the first in his family to attend college. The 81-year-old has repeated the lie many times, starting in his failed 1987-88 presidential campaign — when he first admitted it was untrue.
“I, like an awful lot of people in this audience, was the first in my family to go to college and watched my dad struggle to get there,” he claimed in Wisconsin on Monday.
Yet when he was first called out on the claim in the 1980s, he admitted that members of his mother’s family attended college and that his story was untrue.
However, the Democrat revived the lie during a CNN town hall in 2020 when he was campaigning for the presidency, and he is repeating it now.
Biden, who has also been repeating a previously debunked lie about traveling the world with Xi Jinping recently, told many lies about his academic accomplishments during his campaign in the 1980s. He claimed he “went to law school on a full academic scholarship” — the “only one” in his class to achieve this — and to have graduated in the top half of his class with three degrees as “the outstanding student in the political science department.”
Biden later admitted he did not earn a full scholarship or three degrees, was not named an outstanding student, and ranked 76th out of 85 in his class.
He claimed “his memory had failed him.”
Biden has started repeating an old lie about being the first in his family to go to college. He first made it during his 1987-88 run at the presidency, when he also lied about his scholarship, degrees, and class ranking. After being exposed, he claimed his "memory had failed." pic.twitter.com/LbYn3ilOXr
— Jack Montgomery (@JackBMontgomery) April 9, 2024
