White House claps back at Twitter critics of student loan relief
The normally staid @WhiteHouse account itemized hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt relief given to U.S. House members who criticized the Biden plan.
The official White House Twitter account, @WhiteHouse, normally traffics in staid infographics and excerpts from temperate government speeches, but Thursday night it took an aggressive turn.
In six tweets, the White House account quoted a Republican representative’s criticism of President Joe Biden’s student loan plan and replied with how much money that member of Congress had accepted in forgiven loans as part of the Paycheck Protection Program, which was intended to help businesses during the coronavirus pandemic.
It was a simple formula, and one that had been employed all over social media at that point, but given the source, the tone was unusually pointed. The approach had its fans on Twitter: “This is the best White House trolling ever!” one wrote.
“We’ve never hesitated to call out hypocrisy, and we’re not going to stop now,” Alexandra LaManna, a White House spokesperson, said when she was asked about the tweets Friday. “It’s important to make clear that many of the same people calling student loan debt relief — which will help the middle class and working families by giving them more breathing room — a bailout for the wealthy had no issue with loan bailouts that benefited their own companies, and no issue with giving tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy.”
The White House was not the first to highlight the government debt relief received by critics of student loan forgiveness. Soon after the plan was announced Wednesday, individuals and activists found critics’ loan information on public databases and shared it online.
One graphic in particular was shared widely and listed the same six Republicans the White House identified and seven other members of Congress who it said had been forgiven $38,000 to $4.3 million in Paycheck Protection Program loans.
The comparison between the two loans is not perfectly equivalent. The Paycheck Protection Program loans were effectively designed to be forgiven. The federal government offered them without the traditional standard of vetting for business loans in an effort to quickly distribute money to businesses that were struggling during the first years of the coronavirus pandemic. Nearly every company with 500 or fewer workers qualified for the low-interest loans, which were forgiven so long as the money went to permitted costs.
Matt Coleman, a spokesperson for the Small Business Administration, said the agency could not comment on the White House tweets. “It is long-standing agency policy spanning multiple previous administrations not to comment on individual borrowers,” he said.
The sums that the representatives’ businesses received through this program were also much higher than any one person will get from the student loan forgiveness program, which will cancel up to $20,000 in loan debt for people below certain income limits.
Independent analyses show that the people eligible for college loan debt relief are disproportionately young and Black. The Education Department estimates that nearly 90% of affected borrowers earn $75,000 a year or less.
Some in the worlds of social media and politics speculated that this sassy new tone for the @WhiteHouse account was the work of strategist Megan Coyne, who until recently had run the unusually brash New Jersey state government Twitter account under Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat. Coyne announced Aug. 1 that she was joining the Biden administration’s Office of Digital Strategy as deputy director of platforms.
But the White House would not say how much Coyne was involved with the messaging, and she had no comment apart from tweeting a smiley emoji above a screenshot showing that the responses to the critics were a top trend on Twitter.
The approach itself clearly had full buy-in from the Biden administration. Asked about the tweets Friday, Bharat Ramamurti, a deputy director of Biden’s National Economic Council, told reporters at a White House briefing that “we absolutely think it’s a fair comparison” between the Paycheck Protection Program and student debt.
“Our view is, why is there a double standard here?” Ramamurti said. “Why is it, from the perspective of Republicans, great to forgive a loan of up to $10 million to a business owner, but if we want to provide $10,000 or $20,000 in loan forgiveness for a teacher or a bus driver or a nurse, all the sudden it’s socialism?”
These nuances aside, the Biden White House’s use of a meme jolted a somewhat-sleepy account into the center of the social media debate about the student loan plan.
One of its tweets, which said that Rep. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., had more than $1.4 million in Paycheck Protection Program loans forgiven, was shared more than 44,000 times. A White House tweet from a day earlier, which included a video clip of Biden announcing the student loan plan, was shared a little more than 1,000 times.
“Another ignorant attack from a career politician who has never created a single job,” Mullin replied. “74 days before midterms, Joe Biden is targeting business owners for protecting their employees from government lockdowns. President Trump always supported American workers and job creators.”
The change in tone even coincided with more aggressive language from Biden, who in a campaign speech Thursday night condemned “extreme MAGA Republicans.”
But by Friday morning, the White House account was back to its usual businesslike tone, posting an infographic with student loan data. It had been shared a little more than 2,100 times as of Friday afternoon.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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