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Trump says AOC was a ‘poor student’ who is ‘not smart.’ She responded with a challenge

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez challenged President Donald Trump to release his college transcripts after he called her a “poor student” and “not a smart person.”

“AOC was a poor student,” he said Thursday on FOX Business while talking about taxes. “I won’t say where she went to school it doesn’t matter. This is not a smart person other than she’s got a good line of stuff. I mean she goes out and she yaps.”

Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, responded to the president’s comments on Twitter. She graduated cum laude from Boston University in 2011 with degrees in international relations and economics.

“Let’s make a deal, Mr. President: You release your college transcript, I’ll release mine, and we’ll see who was the better student,” she wrote. “Loser has to fund the Post Office.”

Her tweet referenced the controversy surrounding the U.S. Postal Service’s ability to handle mail-in voting in the November election. Democrats have pushed for increasing its funding while the president has shown a reluctance to do so, McClatchy News reports. He’s repeatedly — and without evidence — said vote-by-mail will lead to voter fraud.

During Ocasio-Cortez’s time at Boston University, she had a John F. Lopez Fellowship, which is offered by the National Hispanic Institute to students who “demonstrate leadership potential, willingness to face challenges, and ability to share talent and skill with the Hispanic/Latino community,” per Snopes.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory also named an asteroid after her in honor of her research. She said she “started at BU as a science major.”

President Trump has long referenced his attendance at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he transferred to from Fordham University, calling it the “best school in the world” and “super genius stuff,” The Boston Globe reports. But he hasn’t released records of how he performed at the school.

James Nolan, who worked at the University of Pennslyvania admissions office when Trump applied, told The Washington Post it was “not very difficult” to get into the school at the time.

“I certainly was not struck by any sense that I’m sitting before a genius,” he recalled. “Certainly not a super genius.”

Mary Trump, the president’s niece, accused him in her book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” of paying someone to take the SAT tests for him to help him get into the school. But White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews in a statement denied the accusation, calling it “absurd” and “completely false,” CNN reported.

Trump has made similar comments about the educational records of political rivals in the past.

During former President Barack Obama’s campaign for reelection in 2012, Trump called him a “terrible student” who didn’t deserve to attend Ivy League schools and demanded he publicly release his academic records, TIME reported. Obama graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, becoming the first Black person to be named president of the Harvard Law Review.

Trump’s attorney later, during his own campaign, threatened legal action against Trump’s alma maters if they released any of his academic records, according to TIME.

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