By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, May 26, 2026
Axios reports that New York Democratic
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is “making new moves toward a possible
White House bid. Ocasio-Cortez launched a national tour in recent weeks —
without calling it one. Democratic operatives expect she would easily raise $100
million just from small-dollar donors, mobilize many supporters of Vermont Sen.
Bernie Sanders’ past campaigns, and command attention as few other candidates
could.”
When lots of people tell a party’s rising star that he
should run for president, he often ends up running for president. (AOC was
elected in 2018, so she’s probably not a “rising star” in Democratic politics
anymore; she’s a full-on star.) There’s no guarantee that four to eight years
from now, Democrats will be as enamored with her. Every incentive is to strike
when the iron is hot, and if you’re a Democrat, you probably feel pretty good
about your odds in 2028 in a national electorate likely to be absolutely exhausted from the Trump era.
This is not good news for the U.S., which faces a
dangerous world now and is likely to face a comparably dangerous world when the
next president takes the oath of office on January 20, 2029. In February, when
AOC went to the Munich Security Conference, she was asked a very basic
yes-or-no question of “would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to
defend Taiwan if China were to [invade]” and answered with incoherent word salad. If the congresswoman
had ever put any thought into what the U.S. ought to do in that scenario, she
hid it exceptionally well.
Her broader remarks weren’t much better. Asked about balancing
a need for increased defense spending and nations’ debts, she veered back into
familiar territory about “reining in corporations” and the “billionaire class.”
She offered generic comments that international aid is good, and rote denunciation
of “NAFTA as a failed policy for many rural and working-class communities.” (NAFTA was replaced on July 1, 2020.) The
Democratic Party is still anti-free trade, even as they denounce Trump’s
tariffs.
AOC isn’t that interested in foreign policy, beyond the
now-standard Israel-bashing; she now opposes all U.S. military aid to Israel, including
assistance to air defense systems that prevent Iranian, Hezbollah, and Hamas
rockets from hitting civilian targets.
We keep getting reminded that foreign policy and national
security are second-tier concerns of the American electorate. But the rest of
the world never cooperates with presidents who want to focus primarily on
domestic issues.
It was only a month ago that Axios
was telling us that while the AOC is a ubiquitous social media presence,
she doesn’t like doing sit-down interviews, and when she does, “it’s usually
with an ideologically sympathetic outlet or reporter.”
We saw this with Joe Biden, and we saw this with Kamala Harris. We are beset by overambitious, under-studied
politicians who are absolutely convinced they’re ready to sit behind the
Resolute Desk in the Oval Office and order U.S. troops into combat when needed,
but not ready to sit down for an hour with a major cable news host who’s going
to ask them tougher-than-usual questions. If you want to be president of the
United States, then you need to be able to sit down with someone who’s going to
say some variation of, “your policies, ideas, and agenda stink, and you should
not be trusted with power” and you need to be able to respond, “no, my
policies, ideas, and agenda are the right answers, and here’s why” in a
persuasive matter. This is Politics 101.
If you need to be wrapped in bubble wrap to get through a
national tour, you are not going to get through the challenges of a
presidential campaign.
The only constitutional requirements to be president are
to be a natural-born citizen and at least 35 years old. (AOC turned 36 in
October.) In a better world, we might add a constitutional requirement that a
potential president must have run something larger than a congressional office
in their life. This is not mocking or thinking less of AOC for having once been
a bartender. Bartending is noble and important work, and unlike members of
Congress, bartenders get judged on their results. Technically, AOC also
founded Brook Avenue Press, a publishing house developing “urban literature
for kids.” The state of New York issued the company a tax warrant for failing to pay taxes. As
of 2022, the tax warrant against her was still open.
Whenever AOC gets criticized, she and her fanbase keep insisting that her critics are “obsessed” with her. (Back
in 2018, CNN aired a segment about conservative media’s alleged
“obsession” with the congresswoman featuring Brian Stelter, Cenk Uygur and
. . . Olivia Nuzzi. I suppose that if you want to discuss the phenomenon of an
unhealthy obsession with political figures, you go to an expert on unhealthy obsession with political figures.)
These same AOC defenders simultaneously insist she is one
of the most powerful, important, consequential, and fascinating figures in
Washington. (As of today, no bill for which AOC was the primary sponsor has
been enacted into law across her entire congressional career.) You can’t have
it both ways. If you are a major political figure who wants to be president,
you must accept the scrutiny that comes with being a major political figure who
wants to be president, and you can’t reflexively deploy the line from Regina
George in Mean Girls, “Why are you so obsessed with me?”
Grähäm Plätner, Stark Raving Maniac
Maine Democrats have nominated a stone-cold sociopath for U.S. Senate, and now
they must pretend like everything is fine.
Democratic Maine Senate candidate
Graham Platner declined to apologize both to voters and a Purple Heart
recipient when asked by Fox News Digital about a deleted Reddit post where he
said the wounded soldier “didn’t deserve to live.”
Platner did not respond at first
when asked outside a market near his home whether he regrets making the post,
which Fox News Digital reported earlier this week showed him mocking a video of
Pfc. Ted Daniels taken during a clash with Taliban fighters in 2012 that ended
in Daniels being shot four times and being awarded a Purple Heart.
“I did four tours in the
infantry, any attempt to say that I disrespect veterans is slanderous and
offensive,” Platner said when asked follow-up questions about what he would say
to any Maine voters who were offended by his post and if he should apologize to
Daniels.
“This video never gets old,”
Platner posted in June 2019 using the Reddit account “P-Hustle,” which he has
acknowledged owning, in reference to a viral video
from the helmet Daniels was wearing while taking enemy fire.
I’m getting awfully tired of this “how dare you”
reflexive indignation schtick when a candidate for Senate has his own comments
read back to him. It’s not the reporter’s fault that you sound like an unhinged
maniac.
Democrats have studied Trump’s success in two out of the
past three elections and concluded that the road to political victory requires
A) saying outlandish things and B) never apologizing, even when one is
abundantly warranted.
Down in Texas, Watching the ‘Jail and Castrate
Zionists’ Democrat . . .
Today, Texans go to the polls for the Republican Senate
primary runoff. Walking scandal machine Ken Paxton, who leaves a trail of slime everywhere he goes, is expected to
win over incumbent John Cornyn, thanks to President Trump’s strangely delayed endorsement. (Our Jeff Blehar recalls, “Paxton fired multiple
whistleblowers in the Texas attorney general’s office for revealing that they
had been forced to employ one of his mistresses, and then he was forced by a district court to pay out $6.6 million in
damages to them, all with taxpayer dollars.”)
But elsewhere in Texas, Democrats have their own
high-stakes runoff. Texas’ 35th Congressional District is one of those redrawn
districts. Today, Democrats will vote in a runoff between sex therapist Maureen
Galindo and sheriff’s deputy Johnny Garcia. Galindo received the most votes, or
a bit more than 29 percent, in the March primary. She has some . . . unorthodox views:
In an Instagram
post last week, Galindo wrote that she will “turn Karnes ICE Detention
Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human
trafficking. (It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles
which will probably be most of the Zionists).”
She
initially insisted her remark could not be considered antisemitic because she
believed in jailing Christian Zionists as well. Then she told the New York Times, “Everything is
based off a local journalist twisting words.”
Ma’am, you
wrote that in your own Instagram post. You decided the context.
Now, every new
member of Congress begins their duties by swearing an
oath.
The Speaker directs the
Representatives-elect to rise and raise their right hands. The oath, which
follows, is stated in the form of a question, to which the newly elected
Members respond in the affirmative:
[Do you] I do solemnly swear (or
affirm) that [you] I will support and defend the Constitution of the United
States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that [you] I will bear true
faith and allegiance to the same; that [you] I take this obligation freely,
without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that [you] I will
well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which [you] I am
about to enter[?]. So help [you] me God.
If you believe that “Zionists” should be jailed for their
views, you oppose the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and thus are not
supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States against all
enemies, foreign and domestic. (There is a strong argument that you are, in
fact, one of those domestic enemies.)
ADDENDUM: Over in the Washington Post, a visit to NASK — the Polish
national institute for cybersecurity — and an observation that the Russian,
Chinese, and Iranian governments collectively spend billions of dollars on
propaganda and information warfare. Meanwhile, we’ve shut down the U.S. State
Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference center
and have Voice of America operating on a skeleton crew. There’s a war going on
to shape how the world perceives America and the other great powers, and we
have deliberately chosen to concede the battlefield.
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