For once, the subject of a story about the Capitol storming is not former President Donald Trump but instead Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Or so the Bronx congresswoman is making it.
Politicians often try to change the subject at hand, of course. Some on the Right have tried to deflect attention from last month’s storming of the Capitol by pointing to the months of relentless looting and rioting by members of antifa and Black Lives Matter. The left-wing violence went largely ignored, if not supported, by much of the media and the Left.
However, focusing purely on the violence obviously missed the point. Unlike last year’s heinous summer of violence for violence’s sake, the storming of the Capitol used violence as a means to try and achieve a much greater end: stealing an election from the democratically elected president-elect.
Thus, Ocasio-Cortez’s latest attempt to try and reframe the events of the siege in emotional terms does more than just place the left-wing congresswoman in yet another high-profile news cycle of her own orchestration. By associating the attack with the trauma of her own story of an earlier sexual assault, she also hurts the cause that Democrats need to be championing before the impeachment trial of Trump begins next week.
The case against Trump on the merits is simple. For two months, he fomented outrage among his supporters by lying that the presidential election was rigged and that actually it was he, not President Biden, who won. After judges he appointed threw out some of his 60-odd baseless lawsuits challenging the election results, he invited throngs of his supporters to come to Washington, D.C., on the day Congress would certify Biden’s victory. There, after an impassioned rally including his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani calling for “trial by combat,” he told his maskless mob that he would lead them to march to the Capitol to “stop the steal.” That armed mob took him literally and seriously, storming the building, with some trying to execute then-Vice President Mike Pence. Five people, including a police officer, died in the melee.
The House charged Trump with inciting an insurrection. In using that precise language, they bring into play not just one but two potential constitutional provisions that might let them bar Trump from holding federal office ever again. The permutations of all of this are complicated, but suffice it to say that there are actual, serious stakes here. There’s a reason the Senate has remained relatively mum on impeachment talk, and surely Republicans are waiting on tenterhooks to see if Trump gives them the cover to acquit with a half-arsed defense or if he knifes them with a lunatic embrace of the storming. Regardless of either outcome, Ocasio-Cortez is not helping her party’s case.
The headline to emerge from Ocasio-Cortez’s Monday night Instagram livestream detailing her experience of the storming is her allegation that she survived a sexual assault earlier in her life. The congresswoman, who has faced Republican criticism for accusing Sen. Ted Cruz of trying to have her murdered because of his vote to overturn the election, did not indicate that the actual assault had any relation to the events of the storming. However, she claimed that those telling her to move on from the storming were “using the same tactics of every other abuser who just tells you to move on.”
Substantively, the sophomore socialist didn’t reveal much new about the storming. She did speculate that a Capitol police officer was “actually trying to put [her] in a vulnerable situation,” and she detailed how she sheltered in Rep. Katie Porter’s office. Based on the accounts I’ve heard from other people who were physically hiding in fear for their lives within the Capitol, I’m sure that Ocasio-Cortez’s experience was indeed traumatizing and terrifying. But somehow linking it to a newsworthy announcement of a sexual assault won’t help her obtain the justice she deserves.
Not one iota of focus surrounding the storming can be taken off the perpetrators. Plenty of people over the summer also hid in fear for their lives as antifa shattered their windows and burnt down their buildings. None of them were watching the rioters attempt to do so with the hopes of disrupting a two-century strong tradition of the peaceful transfer of power and stealing a presidential election.
Furthermore, other than four perpetrators who died, the only other person who died because of the storming was a member of the Capitol police. To even insinuate that one of his colleagues was aiding the perpetrators would provide Republicans ample ground to dismiss the Democrats’ charge as baseless.
With Biden back in the White House, Ocasio-Cortez will have an obvious ally to pass legislation addressing plenty of problems obstructing justice for rape survivors, be it rape-kit backlogs or sexual assault running rampant in the military. Personal anecdotes can be highly valuable, especially when combating skepticism. But if Ocasio-Cortez wanted to advance the public’s push for Republicans to help convict Trump, this didn’t help.
