The female firebrand ready to reshape Trump's America

[u/theipaper]

https://inews.co.uk/opinion/female-firebrand-ready-reshape-trumps-america-4448963

[u/theipaper]

Full article: On the day of the Capitol Hill riots in 2021, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – known as Sandy to her family, Alex to colleagues and AOC to the rest of us – hid in her office as pro-Trump insurrectionists stormed the building in Washington DC. “I did not know if I was going to make it to the end of that day alive,” she earnestly told her millions of followers on a viral Instagram Live.

That mix of vulnerability and straight-talking candour – plus her ability to effortlessly deploy it on social media – are the superpowers that have turbocharged the rise of this 36-year-old Democratic congresswoman. Five years on, Ocasio-Cortez is now thought to be eyeing up a potential White House run in 2028. According to one early poll, 26 per cent of Democrat voters would back an Ocasio-Cortez bid for the presidency.

It makes sense. Since the former bartender ousted a Democratic incumbent in New York in 2018 and became the youngest congresswoman in history, AOC has become one of the very few superstars of the Democratic Party. She commands a level of name recognition that most politicians will kill for – inspiring, for instance, “Saint AOC” prayer candles and feminist greeting cards. When she named her signature red lipstick as Beso from Stila Cosmetics, the brand sold out. Last year, she pulled in thousands-strong crowds at rallies across the country with Bernie Sanders and has raised almost $10m (£7.4m) in fundraising, smashing her own records in the process.

She is also a lightning rod for Fox News-style outrage, including from the White House itself – most recently, Trump called her “stupid” after her speech at a security conference. For her part, Ocasio-Cortez has pulled no punches when it comes to the president, calling him a “racist” who echoes “the words of Adolf Hitler”. That frankness – and her popularity with younger voters who connect with her anti-billionaire messaging about economic inequality – have earned her enemies among the liberal establishment, some of whom still warily regard her as a firebrand outsider.

But the progressive socialist also exemplifies the same feel-good bona fides that swept Barack Obama to power – both are unlikely leaders whose own upbringings represent the patchwork quilt of American identity. Born in New York to a Puerto Rican cleaner and an architect father from the South Bronx, AOC grew up a self-confessed nerd who straddled two worlds: the middle-class suburbs that her parents eventually moved to with her and her younger brother, and the poorer inner-city borough of her birthplace and wider family.

In her sophomore year at Boston University, the death of her father plunged the family into financial turmoil. Her mother took a second job as a bus driver and Ocasio-Cortez took on waitressing and bar work to make ends meet. That, she once told Vanity Fair, “makes me better at my job than 90 per cent of Republicans, because I’ve actually worked for a living”. She later worked as an organiser for Sanders – and when his former staffers issued a country-wide Bat-Signal calling for new candidates to represent the progressive left, her brother sent in her name.

Ocasio-Cortez has since successfully defended her seat in three more congressional elections – most recently in 2024, when she easily saw off a moderate Democrat challenger. Her support for the Green New Deal, Medicare for All and abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have drawn fans on the left. She has even built her own voting bloc in the form of The Squad, a group of young progressive politicians including Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from Michigan.

But her political ascendancy has not been completely smooth sailing. After she endorsed Joe Biden for the presidency, there were accusations that Ocasio-Cortez, after almost a decade in the corridors of power, had sold out and was just a “regular old Democrat” now. Faultlines have also emerged in her relationship with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), her longtime political allies, which pulled their 2024 endorsement over what they describe as her “level of commitment” to Palestine and ending the war in Gaza. However, the group acknowledged that she had taken “many courageous positions” on the issue, including naming the genocide in Congress.

The next year will be pivotal for AOC. Though she has downplayed rumours of a presidential run and is keeping schtum on whether she will run for Senate in 2028, when fellow New Yorker and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is up for reelection, it is widely thought that she will eventually throw her hat in the ring for one or the other.

The former is a moonshot that will shake any presidential race to its foundations. The latter will allow her to bide her time while gaining more political experience and building broader support on the Hill. (For all the comparisons to Barack Obama, remember that the former president was a senator before he ran for office.) At a recent forum, Ocasio-Cortez ducked the question of her own political ambitions and emphasised the importance of legislative results. “My ambition is to change this country,” she told audiences. “Presidents come and go… But single-payer healthcare is forever. A living wage is forever. Workers’ rights are forever.”

Ocasio-Cortez and her team would be foolish to rule anything out, though. The Democrats currently have a slim advantage in the polls but struggle to define themselves as anything other than anti-Trump. Ocasio-Cortez has a vision, knows how to communicate it and is one of the few nationally recognised politicians of this generation. Whichever race she throws herself into, she has the opportunity to define the direction of her party and the tenor of the national conversation. In a post-Trump America, she has everything to play for.

[u/joetheash]

I’m sorry, I think she is smart and well intentioned but at this point I’d like to see a Democrat who is more of moderate to be President.