Considered by many to be the next face of the Democratic Party, progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is now dodging attacks from allies within in own party that could seriously jeopardize her future.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) unleashed a scathing attack against Ocasio-Cortez on Sean Hannity’s Fox News Media’s podcast “Hang Out with Sean Hannity”, calling her “ignorant” for her “tone-deaf” approach to Israel and predicting she won’t challenge fellow New York Dem Sen. Chuck Schumer in 2028.
“To accuse Israel [of] genocide, and you’re sitting in Germany, like, can you talk about tone deaf and just ignorant to the history?” Fetterman told Hannity, referring to AOC’s disastrous foreign-policy outing in Munich last month.
“I mean, more than 6 million Jews [were massacred] — you know the Holocaust — and now to accuse Israel during that just war for genocide,’’ he said in the interview.
“That’s my issue, not because her answer wasn’t great,’’ Fetterman elaborated to Hannity.
Fetterman, who revealed that Senate Minority Leader Schumer frequently confides in him, also predicted that Ocasio-Cortez won’t challenge the longtime Senator.
“She would never run,” Fetterman said when Hannity predicted that Ocasio-Cortez would defeat Schumer in a 2028 primary.
“Either she’ll run for president, or she’ll just kind of continue to ‘rise in’ the House of Representatives,” Fetterman added.
Ocasio-Cortez’s participation in the panel at the Munich Security Conference was widely interpreted as a test of her foreign-policy chops amid speculation she could be floating a possible run at the White House in 2028.
However, AOC stumbled through multiple foreign policy questions and botched basic geography in what one pundit called “an absolute train wreck.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s first glaring error came when she criticized President Donald Trump’s administration’s capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
“That doesn’t mean that we can kidnap a head of state and engage in acts of war just because the nation is below the equator,” she said.
Venezuela is not below the equator. The South American country sits entirely in the Northern Hemisphere.
Ocasio-Cortez also attempted to mock Secretary of State Marco Rubio for saying American cowboy culture originated in Spain.
“My favorite part was when he said that American cowboys came from Spain,” she said, laughing. “I believe that Mexicans and the descendants of African enslaved peoples would like to have a word on that.”
Rubio was correct — American cowboy culture traces directly to Spain’s vaquero tradition, brought to the Americas through Spain’s colonization of Mexico.
Perhaps most embarrassing was Ocasio-Cortez’s response to a question about whether the U.S. should commit troops to defend Taiwan if China invades.
She completely froze for 20 seconds before delivering what critics called “word salad.”
“This is, of course, a, a very long-standing, policy of the United States, and I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point, and we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Ocasio-Cortez also drew fire for accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza while speaking on German soil — the country where the Holocaust was launched — prompting Fetterman’s rebuke of AOC this week.
Fetterman’s entire interview with Hannity is set to air today.