Donald Trump Pushes for Government Funding of a New Trump University

Article By Caleb Ecarma

Donald Trump, known for his scandalous venture in the "Trump University," has proposed a unique idea to change the course of higher education in the event of winning the 2024 election: he aims to start an online, government-funded educational institution to counter liberal-leaning colleges.

Trump revealed on Truth Social Wednesday that this proposal was inspired by recent student movements advocating for Palestine, which he inaccurately depicted as being in alliance with "savages and jihadists."

"The spending on higher education in our country surpasses that of any other nation, yet it converts our students into communists and supporters of extremists of various kinds," he stated. "Today, I declare that we will allocate the enormous funds that we collect through taxation, penalties, and lawsuits against excessively large private university endowments to establish a new entity known as the American Academy."

According to Trump, the academy intends to "amass a vast reservoir of superior educational content that spans the entire range of human knowledge and skills and make this information accessible online to every US citizen free of charge."

In essence, the American Academy would function similarly to MasterClass, a unaccredited online learning service based on subscription, but Trump asserts it would "compete directly" with traditional four-year universities and offer its graduates a qualification "equivalent to a bachelor’s degree."

The specifics of the proposed institute were made available via Politico: The academy plans to grant credits to current students and assist them in finding employment with the US government or its contractors. However, the Trump campaign administrators who spoke to the news outlet were vague about who would manage the institute and stated that options range from a board of presidential appointees to a publicly funded private organization.

Indeed, this is not Trump's first misguided endeavor in the education sector. He consented in 2016 to pay $25 million to resolve three lawsuits — one by the former New York attorney general and two class-action cases lodged by previous Trump University students — stemming from accusations of false advertising and aggressive sales tactics. Eric Schneiderman, the former New York attorney general, commented in 2018, “This settlement signified a shocking about-face by President Trump, who had long refused to provide compensation to his counterfeit university's victims."

As for the American Academy, it is another aspect of Trump's 2024 strategy that encourages a drastic expansion and consolidation of the federal government and executive branch. His other ideas include replacing professional civil servants with political appointees; using the military for domestic law enforcement and expulsion of immigrants; giving cash rewards to new parents; constructing ten new cities on federal land; and setting up large camps for the homeless.