Donald Trump keeps pumping out the insults, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just keeps knocking them right back at him.
At a campaign rally Monday in Lititz, Pennsylvania, the president tossed out some of his go-to attacks against the progressive lawmaker and her proposals to combat climate change.
“A great student of the environment — I don’t think she ever took an environmental course in college,” he said. “She did go to college, right?”
Ocasio-Cortez, who graduated from Boston University with degrees in economics and international relations, argued that plenty of people without a college education could run the country better than Trump has. She slammed him and his fellow Republicans for their elitist attitude toward people without degrees, such as food service workers, calling it “classist & disgusting.”
She also pointed out that as college tuition continues to rise, degrees begin to measure privilege more than competence.
Trump persistently goes after Ocasio-Cortez and her progressive House colleagues in the so-called “Squad”: Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
At the presidential debate last week, he claimed that they “know nothing about the climate,” prompting Twitter responses from all four women. Pressley joked that they live in Trump’s head “rent free.” And Ocasio-Cortez, who worked as a bartender prior to taking office, said that three years ago she would have been gobsmacked if someone told her “an unhinged President of the United States would be repeatedly saying my name at the 2020 debate.”
In her first term, Ocasio-Cortez has been a leading voice in Congress on the fight for environmental justice. Earlier this year, she served as co-chair of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s climate proposal task force. And in 2019, she and Sen. Ed Markey introduced the wide-ranging set of policy proposals known as the Green New Deal.
Trump often brings up Ocasio-Cortez and the Green New Deal at his rallies and frequently attacks her education when doing so. She almost always claps back.