A recent piece in New York magazine caught our eye: “Michael Avenatti’s Campaign Failed Because Democrats Don’t Want Their Own Trump.” Avenatti, as readers may wish to forget, is the trash-talking attorney and left-wing bad boy who made himself famous by representing the adult film actress Stormy Daniels and promoting the bogus sexual-assault allegations of Julie Swetnick against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. He then announced his intention to run for president and promptly got himself arrested for felony domestic violence against a girlfriend.
Jonathan Chait, the author of the New York piece, is perhaps best known as the author of Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail, which hit bookstores just after Donald Trump won the presidency and began to slice Obama’s legacy to shreds. We mention the book simply to point out that Chait has a special talent for bad timing, and when he says the Democrats won’t find their own version of Trump, the careful observer may safely assume that the Democrats will find their own version of Trump any day now.
We won’t burden readers by rehearsing Chait’s self-flattering argument (in short: Liberals are too “intellectual” to want their own Trump). We would simply suggest that it may be someone other than Avenatti. We have in mind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the feisty socialist who successfully challenged Democrat Joe Crowley and is soon to become the youngest member of the House of Representatives. Like Trump, Ocasio-Cortez has a special genius for drawing adoring crowds and for saying charmingly inane and easily falsifiable things: “Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs,” the Defense Department received “a $700 billion budget increase,” etc., etc.
An ordinary person, having been ridiculed so many times for making wildly erroneous claims, would consider being quiet for a time. Not Ocasio-Cortez. This week she declared (via Twitter) that the Defense Department has wasted “$21 TRILLION.” This is supposed to compare favorably with the cost of Medicare for All, which she rightly notes would cost $32 trillion (see “Medicare for Everybody Else”), evidently forgetting that progressives are supposed to dispute that price tag. In fact, however, the article about the Pentagon she cited described $21 trillion in transfers between accounts from 1998 to 2015, not money spent. As the Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl pointed out, the United States has spent only $18 trillion on the military from 1789 to 2018. It didn’t matter. Her tweet, as of this writing, has been “liked” 26,000 times.
The outrageously false statements, the godlike status among a substantial minority of fiercely committed voters, the unorthodox capitalization on Twitter . . . Conservatives had better stop dismissing Ocasio-Cortez as a fool. She knows what she’s doing.
