Trump vows to save young voters from ‘crushed dreams’ in op-ed

Donald Trump has argued in a Newsweek op-ed that President Joe Biden is “crushing” the dreams of young people with “debt, taxes, and inflation,” claiming that he’s “paving the way for a future of anger and despair”.

The oped, titled I Will Make America Great Again for Young People, was published early on Wednesday and is a raging screed against what the former president calls Mr Biden’s “reign of failure, incompetence, and corruption”.

For his part, Mr Trump became the first president to leave office with fewer jobs than when he entered since the presidency of Herbert Hoover which coincided with the Great Depression. Economists have said that Mr Trump’s lack of leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic made the financial impact of the health crisis worse, pointing to policies that helped the wealthy and international trade plans that pushed away US allies and hurt domestic industries.

In the face of all this, Mr Trump still wrote in Newsweek that his administration “created the strongest and most prosperous economy in the history of the world”.

“The US economy had never been better for young Americans, but for the past three years, young people have borne the heavy costs of the failed Biden agenda: crippling inflation, soaring prices, skyrocketing interest rates, unaffordable housing, and escalating crime,” he added.

“When I was in office, the 30-year mortgage rate reached a record low of 2.65 percent—and the median-income American family could afford a mortgage,” Mr Trump wrote. “Yet thanks to Biden’s disastrous economy, interest rates have skyrocketed, making home-ownership out of reach for too many Americans, especially young Americans who in previous generations would be looking to start a family.”

The former chief economist at the Department of Labor, Heidi Shierholz, told ABC News in 2021 that “The utter lack of a coherent, effective response to COVID has just done enormous damage to the economy”.

While Mr Trump argued in his op-ed that he’s a fighter for the middle class, economists note that his policies, such as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of December 2017, handed massive tax breaks to wealthy people as well as corporations.

Mr Trump wrote in Newsweek on Wednesday that “Biden’s war on American energy is making everything more expensive. Thanks to his Green New Deal agenda, new car prices have surged by nearly 30 percent since I left office. The average new car now costs an astonishing $50,000. You practically have to be a rich person to afford a new car. Because of higher interest rates and soaring prices under Biden, the typical car payment is now almost $750 a month”.

Unlike what Mr Trump appears to suggest, the Green New Deal, pushed by progressives, has not been passed and is dead on arrival in Congress with Republican control of the House.

“Instead of helping our young people confidently begin their lives, careers, and families, Joe Biden is crushing their dreams with debt, taxes, and inflation, and paving the way for a future of anger and despair,” Mr Trump wrote.

“But Biden’s destruction of the American economy is just the beginning of his war on young people. The Radical Left has also unleashed shocking waves of violent crime and bloodshed, making our nation’s once-great cities almost unlivable for young Americans entering the workforce,” the former president claimed, seemingly disregarding the fact that the states that supported him in 2020 have higher murder rates.

Mr Trump argued that “Joe Biden’s unimaginable weakness on the world stage is threatening to drag the United States into World War III, which would devastate an entire generation of young Americans”.

In June of this year, the Pew Research Center released a report stating that internationally, “current ratings for Biden are higher than those for Trump, but lower than their peak during Obama’s presidency,” meaning that other countries thought more highly of both Mr Trump’s Democratic predecessor and successor.

The Gen Z-led group Voters of Tomorrow said in a statement regarding the oped that Mr Trump “is lying to young people again, but we are not falling for it. In his deeply misguided op-ed, he writes that young people would be better off electing him rather than Joe Biden in 2024. Trump also claims that young people thrived and prospered under his administration — and will once again if he takes back the White House”.

“These are flat-out lies. But here are the facts: Donald Trump failed Gen Z when he was president,” the group added. “He tried to take away health care and food security for millions of us, allowed corporations to pollute our environment, rolled back gun violence prevention measures, targeted immigrant communities, and only served to benefit the richest, most privileged Americans. Not to mention, the former president’s far-right judicial appointments resulted in the Dobbs decision — a loss of our reproductive freedoms that has since fueled waves of high youth voter turnout in elections across the nation.”