Date: 2025-03-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00016413
People ...US Politics
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ
“I FELT LIKE I WAS BEING PHYSICALLY RIPPED APART”: ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ OPENS UP ABOUT HER NEW FAME, TRUMP, AND LIFE IN THE BUBBLE
Peter Burgess
The pressure is intense. But beneath the caricatures, she says, “I’m not a superhero. I’m not a villain.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ... Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez pictured in her Parkchester apartment.
Photograph by Cait Oppermann.
On a bright Sunday morning in Sunnyside, Queens, a crowd of would-be marchers was milling about the intersection of 46th Street and Skillman Avenue. The St. Pat’s for All Parade was about to begin, but the main attraction was missing. “Do you think she will come?” asked one of the organizers holding on to a bright yellow banner picturing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose district includes Sunnyside. A few minutes later, Ocasio-Cortez cut down Skillman Avenue, surprisingly small, in a long navy blue coat and creamy white scarf, and was instantly set upon by a scrum of photographers and marchers. “You don’t see a crowd like this for Chuck Schumer,” an older man said.
At this parade last year, Ocasio-Cortez said, people “were, like, running away from us.” At the time, she was in the throes of the Democratic primary for New York’s 14th Congressional District against 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley. But now, she’s one of the most visible Democrats in the country, along with Nancy Pelosi—and she’s eclipsing Pelosi, and even Hillary Clinton, as a Republican target. Ocasio-Cortez admits that the sudden fame has been disorienting. “At first, it was really, really, really hard. I felt like I was being physically ripped apart in those first two to three months,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “[On] June 25, outside of my immediate community, very few people knew who I was besides my friends. The night of June 26, there was only one local TV outlet at our election party, and then literally seven hours later I was getting picked up in some Escalade and driven to Morning Joe.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Ocasio-Cortez pictured at the St. Pat’s for All Parade in Sunnyside, Queens, on Sunday, March 3.Photograph by Cait Oppermann.
Ocasio-Cortez hasn’t yet mastered the techniques of deflection; the bubble hasn’t fully formed around her. She lets people into her personal space for hugs and handshakes, and asks personal questions: Which neighborhood in the Bronx? The mass of marchers had hardly moved 10 yards before selfies with A.O.C. stopped its progress. Nearly an hour and a half after her arrival, Ocasio-Cortez swiftly split from the crowd and beelined toward a white van parked at the corner. A quick photo with bystanders, a smile and a wave later, and the van whisked her away. Later Sunday, the New York Post would announce “Ocasio-Cortez leaves parade in 17-mpg minivan—blocks from the subway.”
As we crossed the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge from Queens to meet Ocasio-Cortez at her apartment in the Bronx, we passed Trump Golf Links on the right. It’s a view Ocasio-Cortez knows well, and it inspired the line of questioning she directed at Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer and longtime fixer, the previous Wednesday. Since the Democrats reclaimed the majority in the House of Representatives last fall, their approach to oversight has been measured and deliberate. Under Pelosi’s leadership, it isn’t enough just to request Trump’s tax returns. Democrats first needed to make a public case as to why it was necessary—not partisan. During Cohen’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee, A.O.C., prepped with careful staff work, did exactly that.
Back at her Parkchester apartment, Ocasio-Cortez tells me about that day. “I know that people underestimated me. My whole life I’ve been underestimated,” she said. That night, Ocasio-Cortez received a notification on her Apple Watch that her heart rate was unusually high that day. “It shows you the moment, and it was the moment when I was coming up in the Cohen hearing and my hands were shaking,” she said. “I do feel an intense amount of pressure. Every day for me feels like I’m walking on a high wire. Every single day.”
Parade spectators snap photos of Ocasio-Cortez in Sunnyside, Queens. At this parade last year, Ocasio-Cortez said, people “were, like, running away from us.” Photograph by Cait Oppermann.
Where, exactly, Ocasio-Cortez lives has become something of an obsession on the right. The prospect that her apartment might belie her democratic-socialist bona fides was too juicy for her antagonists to pass up. In fact, the place is thoroughly unassuming, a two bedroom in a standard-issue brick building. The décor is typical for a twentysomething living in New York—geometric-patterned throw pillows on the sectional, a metal-framed round mirror, a snake plant. A.O.C. divides her time between this apartment and a spot in D.C. At one point, her longterm partner Riley Roberts, tall, with red hair and beard, drifted out from a back room. When I said that this experience must have been weird for him, too, he joked that all he had to do was pick up a few things. It was clear he didn’t want a sliver of the spotlight; he just wanted to make sure we didn’t take any photos that revealed the exact location of the apartment.
As with any famous, polarizing person, there are all manner of threats. Outside of Ocasio-Cortez’s office in the Cannon House Office Building in D.C., there is a wall of brightly colored Post-its with notes from her well-wishers. Inside, her communications director, Corbin Trent, said there is a wall of pictures of people who have threatened the freshman congresswoman. But Ocasio-Cortez is under no illusion that the right wing’s obsession will abate. “The whole goal is to dehumanize,” she said.
“IF I DON’T USE MY VOICE, THEN THEY WILL FILL THE VOID.”
A dominant theme of the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference was that Ocasio-Cortez is the ringleader of an insidious Democratic plot, in Senator Ted Cruz’s words, to “kill all the cows.” Former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka likened the freshman congresswoman’s ambitious Green New Deal to a Stalinist watermelon: “green on the outside, deep, deep red communist on the inside.” Donald Trump Jr. suggested that her socialist tendencies would lead to Americans eating dogs. The New York Post noted that she’d failed to compost sweet-potato peels in an Instagram video.
Ocasio-Cortez sees caricatures like these as emblems of her strength. “When you bust out that door and you’re like, ‘No, I’m not going to let you make me feel that way’—it’s kind of jarring. It’s like, ‘Wait, she’s not stopping, and she’s supposed to stop,’” Ocasio-Cortez said. “It can be very empowering to say, ‘Make fun of me. Do it. Draw the little insults on my face’”—she mimed a scribble in the air—“‘Do what you’re gonna do. Act more and more childish. Just do it, because you’re not gonna stop. You’re just not gonna stop this movement. You’re not gonna do it.’”
In her view, Trump, to a large extent, has defined this battle. “I’m gonna be very frank: I think that this president has set a racist tone. I think he has set a tone of such strong misogyny, racism, conspiracy theory-ism.”
Since Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning defeat of 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary for New York’s 14th Congressional District, the Bronx native has been seen as a rising star within the party. On November 6, 2018, Ocasio-Cortez made history as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Photograph by Cait Oppermann.
“I think they saw a woman of color—Latina, no less—that came from a working-class and poor background, that ascended to federal office, and they said, ‘We cannot allow this to have credibility, because if people saw that she did it, then maybe others will come—and we cannot let other people like her run for office. We need to make an example out of her,’” Ocasio-Cortez told me.
That isn’t to say there aren’t times when Ocasio-Cortez would like to stop. “There’s definitely just this really deep feeling of vulnerability around it. You feel very vulnerable. You feel very targeted, because you are. But there are days where you just kind of want to run into a closet, and lock yourself in it, and just hope the world doesn’t find you. I’ve definitely had those days, but I find that it’s more effective to really work on being brave, and pushing anyway, because that’s the whole goal.”
“A lot of days, I don’t want to talk, believe it or not . . . The reality of the situation is that if I don’t define this moment, and if I don’t use my voice, then they will fill the void.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s critics, it seems, are always waiting for her to slip up—to say something inaccurate, to expose her relative inexperience, to provide anecdotes that support the narrative that she is a Communist moron. She is nonplused when I ask whether this dynamic scares her. “Absolutely,” she said, despite the no-holds-barred fearlessness she projects. “Every time I do make a mistake, in the smallest sense, I just feel the weight of the world on me. But I know that that is not a reason to stop,” Ocasio-Cortez explained. “I think one of the taboos that we’ve been breaking has been you can’t learn while you’re in office. You know?”
An Ocasio-Cortez supporter pictured at the St. Pat’s for All Parade in Queens. Photograph by Cait Oppermann.
It is hard to imagine Ocasio-Cortez following in the footsteps of Crowley, and holding on to the NY-14 seat for decades while she works her way up the leadership ladder in the Democratic Party. Her star power seems too unbridled for that. No sooner had she beaten Crowley than people began to calculate what year she’d be old enough to run for president. Ocasio-Cortez has thought about other outcomes, too. “God forbid something terrible happens and everything collapses tomorrow . . . I completely walk away from office tomorrow. There will be more people that are coming and running and advancing the same principles,” she said. “I try to let that be my solace.”
Meanwhile, she says one thing people aren’t saying about her is that there is an ordinary reality beneath the caricatures. “It’s really hard to communicate that I’m just a normal person doing her best,” she shrugged. “I’m not a superhero. I’m not a villain. I’m just a person that’s trying.”
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ABIGAIL TRACY Abigail Tracy is a staff news writer for the Hive covering foreign policy and national security.
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