Trump boasts of his Ivy League education to defend image 'I think to a certain extent, maybe I can blame the media. But politics is a rough business,' he said.

President Donald Trump touted his Ivy League education on Wednesday, highlighting his experiences as a college student nearly 50 years ago as proof that the media is reporting a false image of the 71-year-old president.

“I think the press makes me more uncivil than I am,” Trump told reporters Wednesday afternoon before departing the White House.


“You know, people don’t understand. I went to an Ivy League college,” said Trump, who graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1968. “I was a nice student. I did very well. I’m a very intelligent person. You know, the fact is, I think, I really believe, I think the press creates a different image of Donald Trump than the real person.”

Trump did not elaborate on the apparent correlation between education and civility. But the president did accuse the media of reporting “fake stories” and “a lot of bad things” he said are untrue. He did not specify what stories he considered fake or untrue.

“I think to a certain extent, maybe I can blame the media. But politics is a rough business,” he said. “There’s no question about it. I will say this: I think the Republican Party has a pretty good unity.”

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Trump repeatedly insisted that the Republican Party is unified, telling reporters that the GOP has “pretty good,” “great” and “tremendous” unity, despite the president’s public feuds with Republican lawmakers. He tweeted Wednesday morning, for example, that two sitting Republican senators who have been critical of him “had zero chance of being elected” in 2018 but are acting “so hurt & wounded!”

“When somebody says something about you that’s false, I think it’s always OK to counterpunch or to fight back,” Trump said.

Wednesday isn’t the first time Trump has touted his intelligence. Trump jokingly challenged Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to an IQ test earlier this month, and he mentioned his education at a campaign rally in South Carolina, where he talked about the “level of stupidity” in the Obama administration.

“I used to use the word ‘incompetent.’ I’m very highly educated,” he said on Dec. 30, 2015. “I know words. I have the best words, but there’s no better word than ‘stupid,’ right? There is none. There is none.”