OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
President Joe Biden is raising funds for his presidential campaign mainly from big spending donors, in stark contrast to former President Donald Trump, who has seen his campaign mainly funded by average people.
The president has scored massive donations from special interest groups and corporations but has struggled to obtain donations from small donors, which has been a tenet of Democrat campaigns.
Small donations are defined as being between $1 – $200, Trending Politics reported, adding:
According to FEC records, 35 percent of Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign donations have been from big donors, or contributions greater than $2,000. Just 38 percent of the president’s current campaign donations have come from small donors, or contributions valued between $1 and $200.
As for the Trump campaign, 61 percent of campaign funds have come from small donors while just nine percent have come from big donors. Between 2020 and 2024, President Biden’s total donations from big donors have increased by 10 percentage points, while the former president’s numbers have decreased by the same margin.
The latest figures were reported on the heels of Biden’s swanky New York City fundraiser earlier this week. Headlined by former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the event raised a whopping $26 million, with tickets ranging as high as $25,000 apiece.
Clearly, then, Trump’s campaign is much more of a ‘for the people’ effort in terms of where he’s getting the lion’s share of funds versus Biden’s catering to the millionaire and billionaire class, even as Democrats claim the GOP is the “party of the rich.”
Meanwhile, Biden has attempted to appeal to regular people by again trying to eliminate student loan debt after the Supreme Court stopped him.
But a coalition of conservative-led states has joined forces to stop his new student loan forgiveness scheme.
The Epoch Times reported that 11 Republican attorneys general filed a lawsuit against his news plan in the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas on March 28. In it, they called the program unlawful and said that the Biden administration did not have the authority to implement it.
“A coalition of States sues Defendant Biden, as well as co-defendants the Department of Education and Secretary of Education Miguel Cordona, to stop a second attempt to avoid Congress and pass an illegal student debt forgiveness,” the lawsuit said.
“Just ten days after the Supreme Court’s rebuke, Defendants released a Rule purporting to abolish at least $156 billion in student debt, with a new ‘SAVE Plan’ as its centerpiece,” it said.
The Epoch Times added:
In the summer of 2023, the Supreme Court blocked President Biden’s plan to cancel $430 billion in student loan debt for some 43 million Americans, protecting taxpayers from having to foot the bill and delivering a blow to one of the president’s campaign promises.
Undeterred by the Supreme Court ruling, President Biden quickly rolled out a new student loan forgiveness scheme to take its place, this one an income-driven repayment plan that forgives a portion of student debt based on the borrower’s income and family size.
The regulations implementing the SAVE Plan are scheduled to fully go into effect on July 1, 2024, but the Biden administration said in January that it would accelerate some of the benefits, soon after forgiving $1.2 billion in student loans for nearly 153,000 borrowers enrolled in the plan.
“President Biden’s new student loan forgiveness plan is slightly smaller than the old one, at least for now. But it’s just as illegal,” Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach said.
The lawsuit said that the Biden administration has exceeded its authority by creating the program.
The lawsuit said, “The authority that Defendants claim now lacks any substantive limits and amounts to claiming that they can abolish all student debt at any time by rulemaking alone.”
“Indeed, as the Defendants scrape ever deeper into the barrel for legal pretexts to abolish student debts, the illegality of those artifices becomes more obvious,” it said.
