Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) took a dig at Donald Trump’s reading skills after the president criticized, with falsehoods, the Green New Deal during his campaign rally in El Paso, Texas, on Monday night.
Trump likened the deal — a sweeping House resolution introduced last week by Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) — to a “high school term paper that got a low mark.” He added that the resolution, which is aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions and guaranteeing jobs and high-quality health care for all Americans, would result in the shutdown of “American energy” as well as a “little thing called air travel.”
“They want to take away your car, reduce the value of your home and put millions of Americans out of work,” Trump said of the Democrats’ plan. Earlier in his speech, he’d suggested the deal would mean “you’re not allowed to own cows anymore.”
Ocasio-Cortez reacted to Trump’s remarks with a fiery tweet.
“Ah yes, a man who can’t even read briefings written in full sentences is providing literary criticism of a House Resolution,” the freshman congresswoman wrote, adding a reference to a 2018 Washington Post article about Trump’s habit of receiving oral intelligence briefings instead of reading them.
Several of Trump’s assertions about the Green New Deal are false. For one thing, getting rid of planes, cars and cows are not part of the Democrats’ plan. The resolution also does not explicitly call for the end of fossil fuel development, though it does push for “meeting 100 percent of the power demand” with solar and wind energy over the next decade.