President Donald Trump told a rally crowd in Arizona on Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026, that Barack Obama “got into college for different reasons than you did.”
The president kept going. “He’s not a smart guy,” Trump said of Obama, the former president. The remarks revived a crusade Trump started years ago — only this time it had nothing to do with where Obama was born. It questioned whether Obama belonged at the Ivy League schools that admitted him.
A clip of the comments was posted by the account Acyn (@Acyn) on X on Oct. 14.
The Cognitive Test Detour
Before he got to Obama, Trump got to himself.
The president declared himself a “genius” again, in a rambling return to his self-proclaimed triumphs on cognitive tests. He also said he was angry that nobody had praised him for those claims.
Then came the attack on his predecessor.
‘I Heard He Was a Terrible Student’
The grudge is old. In 2011, while he was weighing a Republican run for president, Trump went after then-President Obama’s academic record.
“I heard he was a terrible student, terrible,” Trump said then. He asked how a bad student lands at Columbia and then Harvard, said he was looking into it, and demanded Obama release his records.
Fifteen years later, the records have not come out and the complaint has not gone away.
Columbia in 1983, Harvard Law After
Obama has written in a memoir that he was not always an academic star.
He also earned a degree in political science from Columbia University in 1983, after transferring there from Occidental College. He later graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School.
Trump, meanwhile, has told the world for years how smart he thinks he is, and he has bragged over and over about his undergraduate education at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
His own college grades have stayed a mystery.
What the 2001 Biography Says
Trump reportedly got special treatment from a Penn admissions official who had gone to school with his older brother, Fred Trump Jr., according to a 2001 biography called “The Trumps.”
The attack on Obama lands on a man who remains popular — a two-term, non-impeached commander-in-chief who was never convicted of anything.
Trump’s jabs at the people who held the office before him have been steady. He has praised himself for not doing “bad things” to Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. He has bragged that he blew away the people who administered his cognitive test.
Ron Dicker, a general assignment reporter for HuffPost, reported the Arizona remarks in a story published Oct. 15 at 6:58 a.m. EDT. Yahoo News Singapore and Yahoo News New Zealand republished it the same day.
The phrase Trump chose in Arizona was the one the crowd heard first: Obama “got into college for different reasons than you did.”