President Trump said Thursday that he believes he has a lot of support on college campuses and that reports of a strong anti-Trump movement in colleges are “highly overblown.”
“I think the numbers are actually much different than people think,” Trump said in remarks at a youth forum hosted by the White House.
In an interview with Turning Point USA chief Charlie Kirk, Trump responded to Kirk’s assertion that conservatives feel unwelcome due to “political correctness” on college campuses around the country with an answer about his own popularity on college campuses.
{mosads}
“If you look what’s going on with free speech, with the super-left, with Antifa, with all of these characters — I’ll tell you what, they get a lot of publicity, but you go to the real campuses and you go all over the country, you go out to the Middle West, you go out even to the coast in many cases, we have tremendous support. I would say we have majority support,” Trump said.
“I think it’s highly overblown,” he added. “Highly overblown.”
Turning Point USA, a conservative activist group with chapters on numerous college campuses around the country, describes itself as devoted to fighting “against intolerance and bias against conservatives in higher education,” according to its website.
The president has praised Kirk and Turning Point USA in the past for their support of his administration and campaign, tweeting his thanks to the group in December.
His son, Donald Trump Jr., has spoken in the past about alleged liberal intolerance on campuses, arguing in October that university professors were teaching “fascism” to students.
“We’ll teach you how to pretend to be an anti-fascist and how to become an actual fascist,” Trump Jr. said of college professors at an event last year.
Updated at 6:35 p.m.