S.E. Cupp
In the wake of his unprecedented campaign and unexpected election, the question always was: What would come after Donald Trump? What were the consequences of electing someone who was inexperienced, undeterred by and uninterested in facts and uncannily adept at whipping people into a frenzy by way of mere gesticulations and tweets?
Would Trump beget more Trumps? Or would the pendulum swing violently back in the opposite direction, producing perhaps a return to thoughtful, accountable and intellectually rigorous leadership?
While we await what 2020 will deliver unto 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., we have our short-term answer in Congress: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
In many ways, she is in the making of Trump himself, only plausible because of him, and only justified in comparison to him.
After all, it’s hard to imagine a political system more enamored and less scrutinized of a candidate-turned-politician as AOC, if Trump hadn’t made acceptable this particular form of politicking — one driven by feelings over facts and heavily reliant on a cult of personality.
Like Trump, she’s been caught repeatedly and unabashedly making stuff up. One example, telling PBS’ “Firing Line” that unemployment was low “because everyone has two jobs.” That’s no less egregious a factual error than when Trump insisted while campaigning that he’d “seen” unemployment numbers as high as 42 percent (when the official unemployment rate at the time was 5.1 percent). Both statements were rated “pants on fire” by Politifact.
She’s also been known, like Trump, to cherry-pick information from partisan sources and extrapolate false conclusions. Late last year she tweeted a screenshot from an article in the left-leaning Nation magazine, comparing Pentagon spending to the cost of Medicare for All. People immediately pounced on her distortion of the data.
More recently, she mistook a line in a UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report from 2018 and declared that “the world is going to end” in 12 years if we don’t stop global warming. Climate scientists say that wasn’t an actual deadline and it’s a misreading of the report.
And, like Trump, she makes wild policy suggestions that have little footing in reality. Raising marginal tax rates on the last dollar earned by the wealthiest Americans to 70 percent is red meat for her base but is logistically implausible, much like Trump’s porterhouse of a suggestion to end birthright citizenship.
But possibly because of Trump, she’s learned that admitting mistakes is an irrelevant exercise, so instead, she turns that notion on its head, insisting that being “morally right” can be more important than being factually right. It’s not Trump’s institution-undermining “fake news” ploy, but a populist wink at the primacy of heart-versus-head politics.
One thing that importantly separates her from him: her earnestness. No one doubts she has a set of core beliefs and a principled commitment to them, even if her own party finds them impractical or politically perilous. And if Trump could totally disrupt the political establishment without a real belief in anything but himself, imagine how much further someone with actual values — and a sense of humor, to boot — could go.
Ocasio-Cortez is applying all the tactics of Trump, but with far more charm, likability and mainstream media support. This makes her a very real and significant phenomenon. One thing she’s proved: Her composition is tailor-made for the politics of right now.
S.E. Cupp is a syndicated columnist.
Yes, I believe the state has an obligation to provide for the needs of the people, where I endorse programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment Insurance, Workmen’s Compensation and others that have made a difference to the lives of ordinary Americans.
But the Democratic Party has lost its way. It has become obsessed with gun control, which undermines the 2nd Amendment; opposed to border security, which is essential to the sovereignty of nations; and become a part of identity politics that fosters damaging divisions, not unity.
Anyone who buys into the Russiagate narrative, at this point in time, which the Democrats and their allies in the media, including CNN and MSNBC, has lost the ability to reason. Hillary, the DNC, key players in the FBI and the DOJ conspired to trash the Trump campaign and now administration.
Richard Charnin, a brilliant statistician, has shown that Hillary did not even win the popular vote. Anyone who, at this stage in our history, continues to support the Democrats appears to me to have lost their grip on reality. Check out https://jameshfetzer.org/2019/01/presstv-jim-fetzer-v-carl-unger-on-roger-stone-and-the-russia-hoax/
Read Fetzer’s book “Render Unto Darwin” and Cortez sounds just like the politician Jim would agree with, especially on social issues and taxation/welfare state. What has happened?
Um…denigrating Pres. Trump’s “suggestion to end birthright citizenship”? Who’s “uninterested in facts” now??
The facts are on Pres. Trump’s side in that matter. The 14th Amendment allows for no such thing as it has been made by shyster lawyers and judges to say. Quote: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, AND SUBJECT TO THE JURISDICTION THEREOF, are citizens of the United States…” People in this country either illegally or say on diplomatic mission are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S.; they are subject to the jurisdiction of their home countries, never having left that little fact. Inconvenient to some people, who are and have been trying for a long time to bring this country down, and make of it merely a part of their totalitarian New World Order.
Which is why the Deep Staters and their acolytes in the MSM have been trying six ways from Sunday to bring down their arch enemy, the nationalist Donald J. Trump. This generation’s Ronald Reagan; who threw a monkey wrench into this same crowd’s best-laid plans in the ’80s. And they are bound and determined not to have that kind of reaction to their agenda happen again.
Game On.
The Cortez syndrome was spawned by Obama. BHO was all of these and more…. inexperienced, undeterred by and uninterested in facts.
Mr. Trump is experienced, undeterred and focused.
“Rice*A*Romney….that must have Zombie Treat” a satire at FauxScienceSlayer based on a century of actual history of the POTUS puppet theatre. Every president since Harding has been a CFR member/puppet, except PDJT. Trump has made some good moves, but is trapped by traitors on every front. Hope is fading fast.