President Joe Biden repeated an old lie this week and claimed that he was the first in his family to attend college, RadarOnline.com can report, even though he previously bragged about his grandfather playing college football.
The awkward incident occurred on Monday as President Biden, 81, appeared for a 2024 campaign event in Wisconsin.
“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,” the president said while discussing his efforts to cancel upwards of $138 billion in student loan debt.
Biden’s remarks on Monday came more than 35 years after he admitted that he was not the first member of his family to attend college.
Back in 1987, shortly before his presidential campaign that year unraveled amid a plagiarism scandal, Biden told the New York Times that “there [were] Finnegans, my mother’s family, that went to college.”
A report from 2020 also found that President Biden’s father attended Johns Hopkins University, and Biden himself bragged back in 2022 that his grandfather was an “All-American football player” for Santa Clara College in California.
President Biden’s maternal grandfather would go on to graduate from Santa Clara College before starting a career in the real estate industry.
“Biden resurrected an old lie,” Donald Trump’s campaign charged in 2020 when Biden once again repeated that he was the first in his family to attend college.
President Biden quickly came under fire for his remarks in Wisconsin on Monday, and several conservative critics rushed to X to call the 81-year-old leader out for the often-repeated lie.
“Joe Biden just said in a speech in Wisconsin: I, like an awful lot of people in this audience, was the first in my family to go to college,” Greg Price, who serves as communications director for the State Freedom Caucus Network, charged on Monday. “That is a lie.”
“One of the reasons we know it's a lie is because Biden has bragged several times in the past about how his grandfather played college football,” Prince added.
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“It’s sad that it has to be pointed out that Biden cannot be the first in his family to attend college,” Washington Times columnist Tim Murtaugh echoed, “while also having a grandfather who played college football.”
Meanwhile, the White House attempted to salvage President Biden’s remarks in Wisconsin on Monday about being the first in his family to attend college.
The White House clarified that President Biden was the first Biden in his family to graduate from college.
"[President Biden] is proud to be the first Biden to graduate college,” the White House said in a statement amid the college claim controversy this week.