Trump: Obama a 'Terrible Student' Not Good Enough for Harvard

Manhattan real estate mogul Donald Trump, then mulling a Republican presidential bid, suggested in an Associated Press interview on Monday that President Barack Obama had been a poor student who did not deserve admission to the Ivy League schools he attended — offering no proof but promising to keep pressing the matter, alongside his campaign against 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 told the AP. "Let him show his records."

The record, publicly known, told a different story. Obama graduated from Columbia University in 1983 with a degree in political science after transferring from Occidental College, then earned a law degree from Harvard — graduating magna cum laude in 1991 as the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review.

Obama's 2008 campaign never released his college transcripts, and his memoir Dreams From My Father is candid about an unremarkable academic start. Trump folded that into a broader claim of concealment: "We don't know a thing about this guy."

The birther controversy had come to dominate the early stage of the 2012 GOP nominating contest, with Trump — a reality TV host riding to the top of polls on the issue — leading the charge. "The last guy wants to run against is Donald Trump," he said of Obama.

Trump said he would decide on a presidential bid by June. He did not run in 2012.

Reporting: NBC New York, Associated Press.