They’re both brash, unapologetic, and enigmatic New Yorkers with ardent cult followings. They have equally tenuous relationships with the truth. While President Trump and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., stand starkly opposed to each other, they’re pretty similar in their refusal to accept the seriousness of the offices they hold.
To her credit, Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest member of the House of Representatives while working as a waitress. That’s a distinctly American achievement, one that deserves our admiration.
To his credit, Trump was a billionaire who listened to the lamentations of ordinary Americans and beat out the most talented field of presidential primary candidates in our recent history to become the president of the United States.
The DNC and RNC establishments took neither Ocasio-Cortez nor Trump seriously, and now they are uniquely positioned to establish the terms of their policies and strategies. So they should start acting like it.
So far, they’re not.
This is a technique of the GOP, to take dry humor + sarcasm literally and “fact check” it.
Like the “world ending in 12 years” thing, you’d have to have the social intelligence of a sea sponge to think it’s literal.
But the GOP is basically Dwight from The Office so who knows. https://t.co/pmkwrdeAnq
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 12, 2019
Okay, AOC isn’t literally referring to “10 people” whom she wishes to exorbitantly tax, though she did seriously cite the dozen years figure in her apocalyptic campaign to pass the non-binding Green New Deal. But she has in fact advocated for a 70% top marginal income tax rate earlier this year.
At the time, I summarized its earning potential in relation to her progressive pet projects:
Ocasio-Cortez’s gripes with fact-checking roughly mirror billionaire entrepreneur and Trump ally Peter Thiel’s distillation of the president’s relationship with his critics.
“I think one thing that should be distinguished here is that the media is always taking Trump literally. It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally,” Thiel told the National Press Club during the 2016 election, channeling columnist Salena Zito. “I think a lot of voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally, so when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment, their question is not, ‘Are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China?’ or, you know, ‘How exactly are you going to enforce these tests?’ What they hear is we’re going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy.”
Thiel’s analysis is correct, but it highlights a fundamental flaw with both Trump and AOC’s approaches in public messaging.
Both stoke fear when advocating their respective policies. Trump relies on fearmongering with the imagery of “rapists and murderers” crossing our southern border to outlandishly advocate for fairly commonsense border security. AOC forebodes that “like, the world is gonna end in 12 years,” if we don’t tackle climate change, correctly diagnosing our political sphere’s apathy toward climate change, but ineptly advocating for a Green New Deal that will do nothing to lower greenhouse gas emissions and everything to nationalize vast swaths of the American economy.
I don’t doubt that Trump, a Queens outsider who built his brand to enter the billionaires club, and Ocasio-Cortez, a millennial self-starter who has observed — first-hand — the few failures of the greatest economic system in human history, genuinely feel the need to prove their authority in their positions.
But then they ought to start rising to the occasion. They’re not court jesters, eliciting few moments of truth, bookended by jokes and nonsense. They’re members and cultural leaders of the governing bodies of the free world, and the public and the media, on both sides of the aisles, must hold them to that standard.
