“Students should not be asked to pay more on their loans than they can afford. And the debt should not be an albatross around their necks for the rest of their lives. It’s no good, it’s not fair.” One can imagine Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders saying those words, but they actually came out of the mouth of Donald Trump during a speech in Ohio a month before the 2016 election.

It’s been completely forgotten today, but Trump’s platform included a decent student loan plan. Calling the debt burden a “crisis,” he vowed to cap loan repayments at 12.5 percent of a borrower’s income, and to completely forgive the balance if a borrower made payments for 15 years. This would be more generous than current income-based repayment plans. Trump also talked about pressuring colleges to lower skyrocketing tuition costs. “If the federal government is going to subsidize the cost of student loans, it has the right to expect that colleges work hard to control costs and invest their resources in their students,” he said in Ohio.

It was just about the last time the words “student loans” ever crossed Trump’s lips. He handed the Education Department to Betsy DeVos, who has been far more concerned with protecting for-profit colleges and debt collectors than any responsibility to students. At the same time, Democrats have come around to the idea that America shouldn’t just make student loans affordable, but irrelevant. Last week, the party leadership signed on to a higher education bill that would leave nearly all students with no debt.

This dividing line between the parties may play an important role in the 2018 midterm elections. Trump’s approval rating has consistently trended lowest among people aged 18-29. Democrats and Republicans appear to be making opposing bets on whether those young people will come out to vote.

Nearly everything DeVos has done inside the Education Department has shown indifference (if not worse) for college students, particularly those most likely to struggle with debt. While Trump’s budgets incorporate his income-based repayment concept, DeVos last year proposed canceling the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, the most generous income-based repayment that the government offers, which forgives payments after 10 years for those who choose public-sector careers like law enforcement, social work, teaching, or legal defense.