WASHINGTON – Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continues to draw an unusually large amount of media attention for a freshman House member, this time calling President Donald Trump a racist during a wide-ranging interview Sunday on CBS' "60 Minutes."

"The president certainly didn't invent racism. But he's certainly given a voice to it and expanded it and created a platform for those things," the New York Democrat told Anderson Cooper.

"Do you believe President Trump is a racist?" Cooper asked.

"Yeah, no question," she replied.

In response, the White House told "60 Minutes" that "Ocasio-Cortez's sheer ignorance on the matter can't cover the fact that President Trump supported and passed historic criminal justice reform" and "has repeatedly condemned racism and bigotry in all forms."

At 29, Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Her social media skills are fierce, helping make the self-described democratic socialist a darling among the progressive crowd and a target for conservatives.

Conservatives have gone after the newly-seated congresswoman for her rent woes, her clothes and, most recently, one apparently conservative-leaning Twitter user attermpter to embarrass her with a college-era dance video. The latest attempt backfired when social media users deemed the video adorable rather than scandalous and Ocasio-Cortez posted a fresh dance video in response.

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Her critics have also flagged a number of Ocasio-Cortez's legitimate social media gaffes, including one in which she misstated the "three chambers of government" and some fuzzy math about Pentagon spending that earned her "four Pinocchios" from the Washington Post.

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Ocasio-Cortez made the comment about Trump being racist in the context of defending mistakes like those.

"If people want to really blow up one figure here or one word there, I would argue that they're missing the forest for the trees," she said. " I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually and semantically correct than about being morally right."

"But being factually correct is important," Cooper reminded her.

Ocasio-Cortez agreed, but added, "whenever I make a mistake, I say, 'OK, this was clumsy,' and then I restate what my point was. But it's not the same thing as the president lying about immigrants. It's not the same thing at all."

When asked to back up her assertion that the president is a racist, Ocasio-Cortez pointed to "the words that he uses, which are historic dog whistles of white supremacy."

"When you look at how he reacted to the Charlottesville incident, where neo-Nazis murdered a woman, versus how he manufactures crises like immigrants seeking legal refuge on our borders, it's night and day," she said.

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Cooper asked her about her "radical agenda," such as getting the country to zero carbon emissions and increasing taxes on the wealthy to as high as 70 percent.

Ocasio-Cortez embraced the label.

"I think that it only has ever been radicals that have changed this country," she said.

On Sunday, Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., called off a Twitter debate with Ocasio-Cortez, citing her "radical followers" as the reason, after one of them wrote, "snipe his ass" in response to one of Ocasio-Cortez's replies. Scalise was badly wounded in a 2017 shooting by a politically-motivated gunman during a congressional baseball team practice.

"She got better aim than James Hodgkinson, that's for sure," replied another Twitter user, referring to the shooter.

"Kick his cane," tweeted another.

"Happy to continue this debate on the Floor of the People’s House, but it’s clearly not productive to engage here with some of your radical followers. #StayClassy" Scalise tweeted.

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