Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez confronted President Donald Trump on Twitter Sunday after he quoted her as proof that Democrats are afraid he will be reelected in 2020.
The New York Democrat suggested that as a representative of his native Queens, only she was able to see through his bluster. She repeated her call for Democrats to impeach him.
“Mr. President, you’re from Queens. You may fool the rest of the country, but I’ll call your bluff any day of the week,” she said. “Opening an impeachment inquiry is exactly what we must do when the President obstructs justice, advises witnesses to ignore legal subpoenas, & more.”
“Bye,” she concluded, in an apparent attempt at “Girl from the Bronx” sass.
Hours earlier, Trump had tweeted a remark that Ocasio-Cortez made during a Sunday appearance on ABC’s “This Week.”
“I think that we have a very real risk of losing the presidency to Donald Trump,” the president quoted from her interview with White House correspondent Jonathan Karl.
Trump added: “I agree, and that is the only reason they play the impeach card, which cannot be legally used!”
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The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-Donald Trump connection
Ocasio-Cortez’s invocation of Queens seemed to be her latest attempt to brand herself as a kind of working-class hero. During her political rise, she has often touted her family’s ties to the Bronx, a New York borough adjacent to Queens.
However, conservatives have just has often reminded Ocasio-Cortez that she actually spent much of her youth in a wealthy suburb of New York. In high school, she was known as “Sandy Ocasio,” according to her yearbook.
In a viral response to Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet on Sunday, right-wing pundit Michael Knowles once again cited this history.
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On the other hand, Ocasio-Cortez’s claim of common roots with Trump was notable given that she has previously chaffed at comparisons of their bombastic brand of Twitter politics. She has intermittently claimed to be more interested in advancing progressive policies than in impeaching the president and deferred to Democratic leaders on the issue.
Inevitably, though, she has returned to the kind of Trump- and GOP-bashingthat have made her a liberal darling and an object of conservative ridicule.
On being exciting and morally right
In the ABC interview, Ocasio-Cortez defended her support for impeaching Trump despite the opposition of a large majority of Americans and her party’s leadership.
“This question should not be about polls. It should not be about elections. I think that impeachment is incredibly serious, and this is about the presence of evidence that the president may have committed a crime,” she said, adding “in this case, more than one.”
Ocasio-Cortez acknowledged that progressive lawmakers are frustrated with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision not to pursue impeachment. But she suggested the party was coming around to her view. She challenged Karl’s assertion that almost all the Democrats who flipped formerly Republican seats in 2018 oppose impeachment, saying “some of these dynamics are changing.”
Asked about a threat by Sen. Kamala Harris, a California Democrat, to prosecute Trump if she becomes president, Ocasio-Cortez said that is outside the House’s duties. Instead, she urged the Democrats to act now, while they still can.
“We have power now,” she said. “And to bump it to when we don’t have power doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
*see full story by the Pluralist