Trump Unveils Higher Ed Reform in New Video

Former President Donald Trump announced his plan to reform higher education and save students from “the radical left” and “Marxist maniacs” in a new campaign video released on Tuesday.

“For many years, tuition costs at colleges and universities have been exploding, and I mean absolutely exploding, while academics have been obsessed with indoctrinating America’s youth,” Trump said in the video, published to Rumble. “The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left, and we will do that.”

Trump’s agenda targets both cultural and economic problems in higher education and he identified his “secret weapon” as the “college accreditation system.”

“The accreditors are supposed to ensure that schools are not ripping off students and taxpayers, but they have failed totally,” the former president said. ““When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors who have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics. We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again and once and for all.”

According to the video, these Trump-approved accreditors will impose standards that include “protecting free speech, eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs incredibly, removing all Marxist Diversity, Equity and Inclusion bureaucrats, offering accelerated options for low-cost degrees, providing meaningful job placement and career services and implementing college entry and exit exams to prove that students are actually learning and getting their money’s worth.”

Trump also plans to direct the Department of Justice to pursue civil rights cases against “schools that engage in racial discrimination and schools that persist in explicit, unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity.” Schools that continue to do so will “have their endowments taxed” and will be fined up to the entire amount of their endowment, which will be used as “restitution” for the case victims, he said.

“Colleges have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars from hardworking taxpayers, and now we are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all,” the 45th president said. “We are going to have real education in America.”

Trump announced a 2024 bid for the White House in November and faces a number of challengers for the GOP nomination, including former Republican South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former Republican Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson. Despite rampant speculation, it remains to be seen whether Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will enter the race.

During his term in office, Trump supported free speech protections on college campuses, signing an executive order in 2019 that would pull federal research funding from schools that do not support the rights of everyone to speak.