Real-estate mogul Donald Trump suggested in an interview on Monday that US President Barack Obama had been a poor student who did not deserve to be admitted to the Ivy League universities he attended.
Trump, who is mulling a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, offered no proof for his claim, but said he would continue to press the matter as he has the legitimacy of the president’s birth certificate.
“I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?’’ Trump said in an interview. “I’m thinking about it, I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records.’’
Photo: Bloomberg
Obama graduated from Columbia University in New York in 1983 with a degree in political science after transferring from Occidental College in California. He went on to Harvard Law School, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1991 and was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.
Obama’s 2008 campaign did not release his college transcripts and in his best-selling memoir, Dreams From My Father, Obama indicated he hadn’t always been an academic star. Trump said that Obama’s refusal to release his college grades were part of a pattern of concealing information about himself.
“I have friends who have smart sons with great marks, great boards, great everything and they can’t get into Harvard,” Trump said. “We don’t know a thing about this guy. There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president.”
Katie Hogan, a spokeswoman for Obama’s re-election campaign, declined to comment.
Trump has shaped himself as an ultraconservative candidate, reversing some positions he once held. He now would make abortion illegal, opposes gay marriage and gun control. He advocates repeal of Obama’s healthcare overhaul that became law last year. He wants to cut foreign aid, is highly critical of China’s trade and monetary policies and wants to end the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
However, he has gotten the most political traction by latching onto the “birther” movement — those who believe claims initiated by the far-right that Obama was born outside the US, despite the release of official birth records in Hawaii and other evidence.
The US Constitution requires that presidential candidates be “natural-born” US citizens.
Of late, Trump has appeared in interviews on all the major US cable television networks, pushing relentlessly his message that Obama needs to prove he was born in the US. He points to his rising poll numbers as proof that Americans like what he is saying on that deeply divisive issue.
“I have more people that are excited about the fact that I reinvigorated this whole issue,” Trump said, adding that “the last guy [Obama] wants to run against is Donald Trump.”
Trump is scheduled to travel to the early primary states of New Hampshire and Nevada this week and said he would make a final decision about a presidential bid by June.
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
RSS